Maybe it's just me, but I've never heard about the WHATWG before. And for everybody like me, that acronym stands for "Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group".
And it's pronounced more or less like "wat-woo-g"
W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
51–60 of 287 posts
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#52I still maintain that the "living standard" is an oxymoron. It's a collaborative browser dev document. Don't get me wrong, that's great. However for everyone else an unversioned document, any part of which can change at any moment, is not what's usually thought of as a standard.
This obsession with "living" and constant change seems to be mostly confined to the web --- instead of settling on a spec and then leaving it alone and "doing what you can with what you have", those working on this stuff seem more inclined with continuing to make browsers change.
I suspect at least part of the reason is to build a high barrier to entry and preserve the monopoly, keeping out competitors, given who the people in these groups work for.
My personal opinion on this is to stop feeding the monopoly and refuse to use anything other than basic HTML for static content sites.
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not like anybody of us voted for W3C either (so it's not like one body is the "legitimate" one and other is not). And the W3C had stalled progress so much in the 00s and 10s, that it deservedly got sidelined.
>It's not like anybody of us voted for W3C either You have more of a voice in the W3C than any other standards body (you can comment on the github issues, or join as an invited expert etc). The W3C was created by Tim Berners-Lee, if anyone should have a vote on how web standards are run, then the creator of the web should be one of the contenders for it. >And the W3C had stalled progress so much in the 00s and 10s No…
> You have more of a voice in the W3C than any other standards body (you can comment on the github issues, or join as an invited expert etc).
That's… not any different to the WHATWG. You can comment on GitHub issues there just fine too. (And you can't just join as an invited expert for the W3C, but even being an invited expert means relatively little in most groups.)
> The W3C was created by Tim Berners-Lee, if anyone should have a vote on how web standards are run, then the creator of the web should be one of the contenders for it.
Tim is scarcely involved in the W3C nowadays, and hasn't been for a long time. The fact he's in theory the Director (but in practice almost everything is done by W3C staff in the Director's name) means very, very little.
That's an appeal to an authority who isn't even present.
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are the same people who created XHTML, an ivory tower idea nobody was waiting for... who didn't support the most popular layout method at the time, tables, in their new styling language CSS. W3C became irrelevant because they kept thinking they could just tell the entire web what to do, that they'd make enormous technical investments to satisfy the W3C's latest fashions. I interacted with them once, over their…
> who didn't support the most popular layout method at the time, tables I can do tables just fine in XHTML. And luckily, tables have become redundant as layout technique, since CSS would do that, already then. The nice thing with X(HT)ML is, that you can place queries against any document, natively.
> And luckily, tables have become redundant as layout technique, since CSS would do that, already then.
It took well over a decade to get CSS to play nicely with layouts. It's disingenuous to present CSS as the obvious solution to a problem while criticising table usage to implement grid layouts, as this line of argument entirely ignores the recent history of the web.
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#55Is WHATWG pronounceable?
"What working group"
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#56Extremely condensed version: W3C is giving up publishing future HTML and DOM standards. They will focus on writing 'recommendations' for the WHATWG's living standards. Versioned vs living HTML discussions aside, I personally admit some mild sadness that the original group responsible for maintaining Sir TBL's work on HTML has been forced to give up.
These are the same people who created XHTML, an ivory tower idea nobody was waiting for... who didn't support the most popular layout method at the time, tables, in their new styling language CSS. W3C became irrelevant because they kept thinking they could just tell the entire web what to do, that they'd make enormous technical investments to satisfy the W3C's latest fashions. I interacted with them once, over their…
> These are the same people who created XHTML, an ivory tower idea nobody was waiting for
I never understood what people had against XHTML. The more common theme seems to be "XML... eww" and nothing else. Can anybody help me understand?
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are the same people who created XHTML, an ivory tower idea nobody was waiting for... who didn't support the most popular layout method at the time, tables, in their new styling language CSS. W3C became irrelevant because they kept thinking they could just tell the entire web what to do, that they'd make enormous technical investments to satisfy the W3C's latest fashions. I interacted with them once, over their…
? Tables for layout? Seriously? Foolishness aside it is important to understand the DOM came out of work from the XML Schema spec and for many years updates to those two documents were always released together. The W3C isn’t irrelevant as there is more to the web than just HTML just like Oasis isn’t irrelevant for schematic design and business integration. This talk of irrelevance is a hard argument to make for many…
Yes tables. There is a reason why people where abusing table for layout even though all hated it.
In the end, we finally have CSS grid now ( https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid ) which do what we were trying to achieve back in the day with tables. We had to wait until 2016 to have a type of layout which is considered standard in most GUI toolkit ...
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#58In practice I've found that web standards are mostly driven by people who are willing to spend the time and effort to iron our all the edge cases.
I've had a very pleasant experience contributing to things like `fetch` and negative experiences contributing to some other things - essentially it's a "people problem" more than a technology problem.
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#59Maybe it's just me, but I've never heard about the WHATWG before. And for everybody like me, that acronym stands for "Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group".
WHATWG is basically the browser vendors sidelining W3C to discuss what features HTML etc should have. The news today is that the W3C finally accepted that situation.
The biggest impact of WHATWG's work wasn't about features, but about defining HTML itself in a way that matched how web pages were written. Before HTML5, every browser parsed HTML in subtly incompatible ways. A document written for one browser could fail to render properly in another. Now, the process for converting bytes into a DOM tree is completely and precisely specified (https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#parsing), down to the level of sniffing text encodings and changing them mid-parse. It's hard to overstate how important this sort of compatibility work has been to the strength of the modern web.
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#60Is WHATWG pronounceable?
"What double you gee"