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Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

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Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#241

Post by colanderman »

ghostly_s wrote: post #224
colanderman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The WHATWG has always opposed the W3C's spec. They see it as confusing to have two "official" specifications. As the old joke goes... if it hurts, they should stop doing that! The WHATWG spec is worse than useless to me as a developer. It's impossible to tell what is usable and what is just Google's wishlist (which is about half of it). The MDN has entirely replaced it for me, since they at least do a good job of d…

> Leave the business of documenting what browsers actually conform to to the W3C. Documenting the prevailing conditions is very much not the purpose of a standard .

That's what the W3C has historically done, with HTML 2.0, 3.2, and 4.0. "Document, clean up, and nudge" is maybe a better description. The WHATWG today seems to take more of a "document, don't clean up, and add our wishlist" approach. (The "don't clean up" mentality is embodied in their "don't break the web" ethos; the "add our wishlist" mentality is a consequence of the "living standard" ethos… the "standard" never becomes reality because it is constantly changing.)

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#242

Post by Ajedi32 »

klez wrote: post #211
xnyanta wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does say that they are members of the W3C organization.

So could I. I mean, I see what you mean, but to a casual observer that's not very clear.

GP is referring to the "Member" badge next to the commenter's name, not to any claims made in the comments themselves.

You could claim to be a member of the W3C, but unless you actually are that badge won't show up next to your name in the issue tracker.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#243

Post by ttepasse »

make3 wrote: post #238
c-smile wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does not mean that it is a good thing to put all bells and whistles from different browser vendors under the same umbrella. Let's say you are a) owning and b) managing a project that three competing teams are working on in parallel. If you will not curate the project you will have one team adding and another team adding ... In real world you would invite dedicated architect or team of architects to define the sp…

the formal complaints of all browser people seem to support the WHATWG

The browser people are the WHATWG. There are no other stakeholders in that.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#244

Post by Latty »

xg15 wrote: post #87
tptacek wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that a bunch of standards group officials can decide for the world that web pages are simply lightweight content publishing mechanisms and that real applications should be build exclusively in Flash and that that worldview can be ratified and mandated by browser vendors does not seem amazing to me. At any rate: the Internet is a market system, not a top-down autocracy.

The alternative (and current reality) is that the same things are decided by about four companies in an entirely intransparent manner. At least the W3C had processes and a wide array of members.

Uh, WHATWG is an open process - they have a similar level of control over things that W3C had.

If you want to try and claim W3C ever had the power to enforce people following their specs, IE6 would like to have a word.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#245

Post by manigandham »

dragonwriter wrote: post #186
chrismorgan wrote: post #114

Serious question: why are the W3C still publishing or trying to publish standards for DOM and HTML and probably a few others, when no one that matters cares about them? Why not rather throw in the towel on those particular standards and acknowledge that the WHATWG has won on them?

> Serious question: why are the W3C still publishing or trying to publish standards for DOM and HTML and probably a few others, when no one that matters cares about them? There is a potential legitimate role for the two-track approach, if WHATWG represents a moving target of what browser vendors have agreed to implement and essentially is the vehicle for documenting hmthe agreed future common web platform, and W3C pr…

Why cant people just use an older copy of the WHATWG standard as the new "stable" documentation? This is basically how caniuse.com and browserslist work today, allowing developers to precisely describe their compatibility targets and even automate their builds.

It seems unnecessary to have an entirely separate organization to just copy/paste/publish new "versions" of existing archives.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#246

Post by Latty »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #138
kuschku wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a child in elementary school, a standards committee decided to change my native language. They replaced the spelling of most words, and many grammatical rules. We were forced to obey these changes, any use of the old rules was counted as mistake in school. Back then, many older books were still using the old rules. By the time I left high school, almost no books with the old rules were left. All had been r…

If you want a more tech-related example, Jobs said "no flash on iPhones", and in a few years... poof! no flash.

The counter to that is pretty obvious, because if you remember Jobs also said "no native apps on iPhones", and then in a few months... poof! an app store.

Flash was pretty much dead anyway, and the web platform had advanced enough to mostly replace it at that point. That wasn't true for native apps.

If you want to make a standard, it has to let people do the things they want to do. Otherwise, people will just use a different (or no) standard.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#247

Post by saas_co_de »

colanderman wrote: post #178
qmarchi wrote: post #5

For some clarity: - Mozilla's Objection: https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/175#issuecomment-380771954 - Apple's Objection: https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/175#issuecomment-380534425 - Microsoft's Objection: https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/176 - Google's Objection: https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/177

Thanks. The TL;DR seems to be that, instead of sticking to documenting what is , the W3C is (either deliberately or through incompetence) trying to push their own "vision" for DOM 4.1 without browser buy-in.

Tldr is that corporations don't want a standards body with any public input so they created their own competing body, strangled w3c, and are now saying w3c is limited to being a rubber stamp for the standards they create.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#248

Post by dragonwriter »

manigandham wrote: post #245
dragonwriter wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Serious question: why are the W3C still publishing or trying to publish standards for DOM and HTML and probably a few others, when no one that matters cares about them? There is a potential legitimate role for the two-track approach, if WHATWG represents a moving target of what browser vendors have agreed to implement and essentially is the vehicle for documenting hmthe agreed future common web platform, and W3C pr…

Why cant people just use an older copy of the WHATWG standard as the new "stable" documentation? This is basically how caniuse.com and browserslist work today, allowing developers to precisely describe their compatibility targets and even automate their builds. It seems unnecessary to have an entirely separate organization to just copy/paste/publish new "versions" of existing archives.

> Why cant people just use an older copy of the WHATWG standard as the new "stable" documentation?

Because the order of incorporation into the standard and the order of implementation and stabilization aren't the same, and some fesutres may be implemented incompletely in some browsers, so that what is stable and usable is a subset of features (and sometimes a subset of functionality within a particular feature) that doesn't correspond to any particular version of the LS. So you'd need manual curation.

> It seems unnecessary to have an entirely separate organization

Perhaps, though the audience and thus interested parties for the implementor-focussed spec and the developer-focussed spec are different.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#249

Post by ktosobcy »

blablabla123 wrote: post #135
jlebrech wrote: post #52

time to use WASM to render the whole thing, ditch W3C. and all the players are there to make the change.

Yup, every page looks different anyway, calling megabytes of minified, obfuscated JavaScript. There is probably more in for the user. I guess then you only need , , and a subset of DOM.

That's what you get when you are trying to reinvent the wheel... that is OS controlls, which are just fine and most of the time (in contrast to the web) don't break the layout if you change something by 1px…

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#250

Post by saas_co_de »

jsgo wrote: post #236
da_chicken wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you fork an existing rendering engine, you're rather implicitly using a WHATWG DOM. In order to use W3C DOM 4.1, you'd either have to modify a WHATWG DOM renderer into a W3C DOM 4.1 renderer -- which is a bit like starting with the emacs source to build a vim clone -- or to build your own. The inertia of forking an existing project pushes you towards the WHATWG implementation, not W3C. That's the point of forking.…

If that's the case: 1a) Why would it matter that Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and/or Apple object to W3C DOM 4.1 if they don't implement it? 1b) Why would Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and/or Apple care enough to object to W3C DOM 4.1 if they aren't implementing it? Why would they even give any effort to a competing specification and just allow it to die from inactivity? 2) Why does what is in W3C DOM 4.1 matter if the…

Exactly. They don't want any competing products so preventing the development of a standard they don't control is obvious.
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