Is WHATWG pronounceable?
what-wig
I say "wot-wug", but then I've never actually had a spoken conversation about web-standards in over 20yrs of making websites (mostly non-commercially)
W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
71–80 of 287 posts
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#72Earlier 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.
They were focused on data organization and security instead of rounded corners or querySelectors, but most frontend developers saw that as stalling.
They were focused on replacing web development practices. Something that was much needed, but completely uncalled for.
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
? 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 ...
`display: table` has been around since around 2001/02, for exactly that reason. However IE didn't support it until IE8.
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#74I 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…
More probably, it's just that there is a lot of money to make in taking total control of the user experience. Up till now, we had to deal with this pesky OS, those package dependencies, long cycles, and complicated installation process. But with the Web, you can inject your code almost in real time on the user machine, they don't have to understand anything, they don't have to wait, and you don't have to care about what's under the hood. In fact, the user doesn't even know or accept it's running a software.
Now the browser is pretty limited, sandbox and all that, so companies making bank with it want to widen what they can do with it, again, and again, until the browser becomes an OS under their control, and the user machine just a terminal to access it.
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#75Earlier 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... who didn't support the most popular layout method at the time, tables, in their new styling language CSS. You certainly could lay out pages using tables in XHTML, but the point of the standard in the first place was to enable semantically sound documents for the sake of interoperability and to facilitate separation of concern…
After writing XHTML for several years (giving it a full-faith attempt) I never understood the point. You keep repeating "semantically sound" but I can't fathom what that means in your context. I never saw any indication that XHTML brought significant practical semantic information or standardization over what HTML5 can do. It did add significant gratuitous verbosity that made XHTML documents much harder to read and edit.
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 marku…
You don't come from print design by any chance?
You've not been doing that whole web design thing for very long, by any chance? Those of us who have been around for a while do remember the inadequate layouting capabilities of CSS of bygone eras. While I was on the semantic markup side of the debate at the time, it's not as if the pragmatists that just went with the table for convenience's sake did so for no reason at all...
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#77Earlier 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?
The error handling has already been mentioned. There also was that issue of what mime-type to send in your HTTP headers to get the page displayed correctly in various clients. While you could develop in XHTML, you needed to serve it as technically broken HTML to be compatible with older browsers that still had a significant market share.
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 marku…
> Tabular markup for non-tabulated data is not rational & semantic markup is certainly not irrational.
Aren't you talking past each other? The issue is that with initial versions of CSS, replicating the powerful layout possibilities of tabular markup was not possible. Developers generally built layouts using "float" instead, and had trouble replicating some of the standard table features like keeping columns the same height.
Only with full CSS 2.1 implementation in IE8 did this state of affairs change, at that point you could apply rules like "display: table" to DIVs and get the same layout possibilities without using tables.
Flexbox, on the other hand, is actually an improvement (are are Grid Layout and Template Layout Modules). But it didn't come until after CSS 2.1.
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#79I 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…
> I suspect at least part of the reason is to build a high barrier to entry and preserve the monopoly
That is far too grand a motive. The reality is that the average web developer has a shelf life of about 5 years or is primarily focused elsewhere, such as Java or C#. That said consider the people who do this work with 100% focus. These people are typically not the same developers who are performing graduate level statistical analysis, building artificial intelligence, or resolving quantum computing. The hiring expectations for front-end developers in the corporate world tend to skew much lower, and the historical average salaries for these positions reflect that. Taking this into account I suspect the real reason for the constant churn is that many of these developers want things to be easier everything else be damned.
Re: W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM
#80I 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…
> 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.
A lot of what happens in someone like Chrome implements something not yet standardized, then it gets standardized in a different way, or Mozilla implements something and Chrome implements it differently from the standard, perhaps to try and reach the same goal without a care for the yet to be finalized standard.
Of course Embrade, Extend, Extinguish is something I think of mostly in regards to Google, but I rather not think they're completely and utterly sinister in their goals. Some parts of Google are bad, just like some parts of Microsoft (sadly) are bad.
Go is a good example of the good parts of Google. Sure the core team works for Google, but they make all the decisions, not Google.
VS Code is another good example in regards to Microsoft, and soon enough GitHub (which I suspect is implementing a lot of ideas they couldn't afford to work on prior to the acquisition).