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W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM

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Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM

#61

Post by jrochkind1 »

On the one hand, good.

On the other, it seems like just complete capitulation by the W3C; WHATWG makes all the real decisions still, W3C now performs important administrative services for free, turning the "living standard" into an actual usable standard, without actually having any meaningful power over the results. WHATWG gets to do the part that matters without having to do the hard part, W3C does the hard part for them without any control over what matters.

On the other other hand, sometimes when the battle is already lost, formal capitulation is all that's left.

The browser vendors took control of the web standards process from any body that might represent/balance multiple constituencies/interests, and that's just how it is now.

Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM

#63

Post by dillonmckay »

inglor wrote: post #58

In 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.

Isn’t that the case with most human committees?

Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM

#64

Post by pbhjpbhj »

cotelletta wrote: post #34
zmix wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Did you miss the 5-10 years during which every CSS designer tortured themselves replicating tables with floats? Google 'pure css page footer' to see the wreckage. CSS tables took years to be supported, and even then, only brought back what people had been irrationally told to stay away from. It took another 5 years for flex box to become usable, adding something actually new. To this day, changing a site's entire des…

Tabular markup for non-tabulated data is not rational & semantic markup is certainly not irrational.

You don't come from print design by any chance?

With flexbox, for example, you can change order of appearance contrary to the code order in the markup. It's not a mirage. Anyone who's used a browser's reader mode, or distilled view (as Brave calls it), knows the usefulness of applying different styles to a fixed markup.

Separation of presentation is possible.

Indeed now we've moved to responsive design and the number of devices and UA has exploded the separation of design and data is coming in to its own -- but instead pixel-perfection is still being chased with a billion @media declarations.

Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM

#65

Post by tannhaeuser »

stupidcar wrote: post #42
ChrisSD wrote: post #9

I 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.

"Standard" = consensus definition of desired behaviour. "Living" = open to change. I don't see what is so oxymoronic about this? Just because a consensus has been reached doesn't mean that consensus must be immutable. Just because the process of standardisation in some technical domains has tended to use versioned documents doesn't mean that such an approach is fundamental to standardisation.

The point is that HTML is almost 30 years old, and based on SGML which is much older (even though ISO 8879 is officially "only" from 1986), where SGML is just a formalization of typesetting practices established in the 1960's and 1970's. Given the depth of usage of HTML in everyday life (laws, contracts in ecommerce, medical records, personal communication, education, etc., etc.), I think HTML deserves better than being tinkered with all the time for no good reasons other than job security and/or achieving Webkit dominance, or other nebulous reasons at this point. At the very least, a standard should serve the purpose of defining a wellformedness criterion for a deliverable that you outsource to some HTML author, and that doesn't change all the time.

These are the first sentences of Yuri Rubinski's foreword to The SGML Handbook outlining the purpose of markup languages (from 1990):

> The next five years will see a revolution in computing. Users will no longer have to work at every computer task as if they had no need to share data with all their other computer tasks, they will not need to act as if the computer is simply a replacement for paper, nor will they have to appease computers or software programs that seem to be at war with one another.

Held up to that goal, HTML has utterly failed. And there's just no justification for attempting to complicate HTML, leading only further away from that goal, and by intent never coming to an end for a task that isn't terribly complicated, and increasing the scope without any sense of mental discipline, and without considering the scarce resources available, thereby creating a browser monoculture.

Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM

#66

Post by ChrisSD »

klez wrote: post #56
cotelletta wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

> 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?

IIRC, the main objection was that error handling was an all or nothing affair. Whereas most HTML on the web is (or was) broken to a greater or lesser degree. There was also the objection that stricter parsing made it harder for hobbyists.

In these days of Typescript, where web devs seem to like having stricter rules, it could play better. But that ship has already sailed.

Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM

#67

Post by pbhjpbhj »

klez wrote: post #56
cotelletta wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

> 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?

Agreed, I was all-in on XHTML, I'm still smarting that HTML5 won with the seeming death of the semantic web.

We did get a handful of different names for a div though, so that's nice, maybe.

Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM

#68

Post by sheepdestroyer »

baybal2 wrote: post #14
jsgyx wrote: post #7

So W3C is signing to confirm their irrelevance?

Indeed, and so will Mozilla do once Google and Apple decide that they no longer need them to legitimise WHATWG. Mozilla execs dug a ditch for W3C, but fell in it themselves. Mozilla set itself on this trajectory once they stopped their backing of W3C. The only point of Firefox was it delivering quick, glitch free, standard compliant web. With web standards becoming defunct, it is there no more. But hey, Mozilla execs…

What could Mozilla have done with W3C making HTML5 DRM (EME) part of the official spec?

That stance is the main reason W3C lost support from the community (They not only lost Mozilla but also EFF and a lot of trust from independent developers).

That DRM affair was also conducted in a very shady way with secret votes, etc...

Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM

#69

Post by deadbunny »

sureaboutthis wrote: post #50
cotelletta wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

> didn't support the most popular layout method at the time, tables Tables were NEVER a layout method and it was only used for that because CSS was deficient at the time.

> Tables were NEVER a layout method except for the decade or so they were

Okay.

Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM

#70

Post by realityking »

nicoburns wrote: post #37
baybal2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't great at all, because even that living standard is never being implemented up to spec, often by the same people who wrote it, and the current browser support status usually ends up being "what's written in bugzilla"

There are very comprehensive browser support matrices at https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ (JavaScript features) and https://caniuse.com/ (DOM features). It's only for very recently implemented features that you should need to look in bugzilla.

JavaScript (EcmaScript) follows a more traditional standard process, though at a very high pace.

caniuse.com is amazing but let‘s not kid ourselves what it covers. It‘s about feature availability. Some feature might have 1000s of normative behaviors specifics but their being condensed down to there/not there.

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