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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

#371

Post by rossy »

c-smile wrote: post #356
rossy wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

flex-wrap. flexbox is one-dimensional, so it can "wrap" items that don't fit to the next line. The wrapped items don't have to line up with vertical grid lines, like they would in a grid, and they can be stretched or centred to fit across the full width of the parent.

How that is different from a sequence of display:inline-block's (horizontal wrap) and multi-col layout (vertical wrap)?

Like I said, stretching and centering. The justify-content property works on each row of a flexbox, so you can have a flexbox full of items with different initial sizes, automatically wrap the items that don't fit to multiple rows, and distribute the space around each item evenly. You can't do this with flow layout.

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

#372

Post by Hello71 »

adamrezich wrote: post #365
kuschku wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, you mean like AMP, which now every major site supports, and which is even stricter than XHTML?

Turns out, when there's financial incentive to use strict syntax, people will... guess that's all XHTML lacked...

I mean... yeah? "there must be an actual benefit to do something that costs me development time = money". XHTML did not offer this.

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

#373

Post by Hello71 »

chias wrote: post #144
xtian wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the versions of IE in use didn’t support application/xhtml+xml anyway so you would have to switch to text/html based on the user agent string. It was never clear what the technical benefit of this was supposed to be. I only ever saw one site whose pages served double duty as an API and UI by serving styled XML. It seemed like a challenging approach to pull off well.

The Gentoo website / handbook does this. Or rather, did this a few years ago when I was last messing around with Gentoo. It seems to be HTML now.

The Handbook was interesting in that it was one of the few sites that actually went with the XML + XSLT = XHTML route. Of course, nobody knows XSLT, and everyone hates XML, so it was dumped in favor of MediaWiki, which everyone still hates, but at least now mostly understands how to use. (although the same people that insisted we use XML+XSLT also insisted we use SMW, which is even worse... I gave up then, but I hear they're trying to undo SMW now.)

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

#374

Post by lucideer »

lambda wrote: post #239
lucideer wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no point in reconciling the specs if you don't actually reconcile them completely agree > yes, they hijacked the process in the sense that the WHATWG agreed to work together with the W3C, but the W3C never really worked in good faith to resolve differences or provide technical arguments for their changes. I can't see either party working in good faith. In what way did the WHATWG's "agreement to work togethe…

Ian Hickson, the editor of the WHATWG spec at the time, acted as editor of the HTML5 standard at the W3C for a while after the two groups agreed to work together. However, the committee had chairs who could override the editor. However, despite a couple of years of effort working together, the W3C process allowed for a lot of people to raise objections that re-litigated a lot of things that had already been decided i…

> By the way, I haven't followed this drama in a few years, but taking a look at what's happening now, it looks like the W3C is essentially just plagiarizing the work of the WHATWG.

Ditto, and it's why if anyone asks about HTML and spec. conformance, I don't even mention the W3C, except to dissuade them from paying any attention to them. Their current HTML work is irrelevant and misguided.

My issue here is more with the historical negationism around the relationship between the organisations. The W3C's current HTML is, frankly, wrong-headed. But the context around their current situation is the fact that they've been bullied, cajoled and even somewhat ridiculed reputationally into these quite irrational actions by the WHATWG's very existence. That fact is lost when they're accused of acting negatively toward the WHATWG (e.g. hi-jacking apparent agreements and processes), when the actual background was WHATWG originally hi-jacking the specification of the web's central language.

Your post here is supporting the idea that the W3C's current direction on HTML is irrational. That's fine, I agree. But what they're doing is no worse than what WHATWG did originally with HTML5; the only differentiator is that WHATWG was extremely powerful (being primary implementors) and could use that power to win hearts and minds of pragmatic developers. The W3C have no such power and as such their wrong-headed actions are fruitless. But the equivalence is still worth pointing out.

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

#375

Post by chias »

Hello71 wrote: post #373
chias wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Gentoo website / handbook does this. Or rather, did this a few years ago when I was last messing around with Gentoo. It seems to be HTML now.

The Handbook was interesting in that it was one of the few sites that actually went with the XML + XSLT = XHTML route. Of course, nobody knows XSLT, and everyone hates XML, so it was dumped in favor of MediaWiki, which everyone still hates, but at least now mostly understands how to use. (although the same people that insisted we use XML+XSLT also insisted we use SMW, which is even worse... I gave up then, but I hear…

Interesting!

What's SMW? I'm not familiar with the term and searching for it isn't being particularly helpful.

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

#376

Post by domenicd »

hungryfoolish wrote: post #353
domenicd wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MIME Sniffing, Streams, Console, and Quirks Mode Standards are all edited by people who are not working for the browser-engine-developer companies. (Streams is co-edited by Googlers as well.) That's 4 out of the 15 standards currently developed at the WHATWG; not so bad, given how few companies are willing to pay people to work full time on web standards. Of course, we have lots of work to do, and if you or anyon…

> That's 4 out of the 15 standards currently developed at the WHATWG; not so bad, given how few companies are willing to pay people to work full time on web standards. Thats actually nice to know, but specifically about HTML (which is one of the most important specs the whatwg works on) it's all browser makers. (That too, majority of them from one particular browser maker). >I think this is probably the right way to…

Oh, you're right, I forgot HTML! That is co-edited by someone from Bocoup too. So make it 5 out of 15.

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

#377

Post by mcchampion »

ubernostrum wrote: post #364
colanderman wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the intent of your comment; failure to track what browsers actually do is exactly the problem with the WHATWG "living standard" – it's very much a forward-looking spec at best, and too often a wishlist.

The ideal situation is for the WHATWG document to be a roadmap of what vendors have discussed and tentatively agreed on, and the W3C document to be a periodic snapshot of what's actually been implemented. That wouldn't make either one of them "bad". The issue here seems to be W3C wanting to push forward things that the vendors haven't agreed on or implemented yet.

I don't think the W3C DOM document has anything the developers haven't agreed to. The problem is that it's an incomplete, intrinsically out of date, and often buggy subset of the the WHATWG living standard.

I agree that the W3C value proposition COULD be to publish a snapshot that describes what's actually implemnted. That might be a way forward here, but it requires a lot of work to define what "actually implemented" means in a useful way, and to check the test results and update the document (or build an automated way to harvest resources such as https://wpt.fyi/dom ).

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

#378

Post by monetus »

kuschku wrote: post #115
monetus wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be awesome if the layers of the browser would allow for a more parseable, document-based web. That would be an effort towards standardization. But are you really advocating for removing dynamic media from the browser? That seems like an incredible step backwards in most regards. In the absence of a desktop toolkit to rule them all, browser standardization is what we are left with right?

> In the absence of a desktop toolkit to rule them all Qt. Runs everywhere, works everywhere, just fine.

Ah, this gets into gpl vs bsd though doesn't it? I'm not sure what to think about dual licensing. I have a fondness for Qt, but I also like tcl/tk so... its hard not for me to think of that xkcd about standards. https://xkcd.com/927/

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

#379

Post by mattur »

lucideer wrote: post #374
lambda wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ian Hickson, the editor of the WHATWG spec at the time, acted as editor of the HTML5 standard at the W3C for a while after the two groups agreed to work together. However, the committee had chairs who could override the editor. However, despite a couple of years of effort working together, the W3C process allowed for a lot of people to raise objections that re-litigated a lot of things that had already been decided i…

> By the way, I haven't followed this drama in a few years, but taking a look at what's happening now, it looks like the W3C is essentially just plagiarizing the work of the WHATWG. Ditto, and it's why if anyone asks about HTML and spec. conformance, I don't even mention the W3C, except to dissuade them from paying any attention to them. Their current HTML work is irrelevant and misguided. My issue here is more with…

For anyone confused about how the WHATWG came to write a new HTML spec entirely from scratch, after the W3C blocked the work happening at the W3C, this is a good place to start: http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html#webapps-cdf

I'm going to assume your point that the WHATWG is "extremely powerful" compared to the W3C was meant to be satirical.

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

#380

Post by spiralx »

xtian wrote: post #122
Sharlin wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the web quickly moved to XHTML. This simply is not true. The web moved to an XHTML-like dialect of HTML which was still served as text/html and browsers interpreted it as "HTML soup" because actually serving pages as application/xhtml+xml would have broken the majority of the web because browsers would actually validate them and refuse to display a page at all if there was even a single missing close tag.

And the versions of IE in use didn’t support application/xhtml+xml anyway so you would have to switch to text/html based on the user agent string. It was never clear what the technical benefit of this was supposed to be. I only ever saw one site whose pages served double duty as an API and UI by serving styled XML. It seemed like a challenging approach to pull off well.

I wrote an XSL stylesheet that turned an HTML page into a pretty-printed and syntax highlighted display of its source code.
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