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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

#81

Post by oldjokes »

austincheney wrote: post #79
userbinator wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

This is the most arrogant and condescending comment I think I've ever read on HN, you spend so many words dancing around it, just call web developers stupid and lazy instead of wasting so much space.

It's not good enough to for me to be an arrogant techno-mage looking down on those stupid commoners from my technical tower, I must now also shit on all the other lower developers I have judged to be not as smart as me, some other class of developer.

Fuck off.

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

#82

Post by geezerjay »

cygx wrote: post #77
klez wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sounds like the complains are targetted at faulty implementations, not the document standard.

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

#83

Post by mehh »

sheepdestroyer wrote: post #68
baybal2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Lost trust from a small but very vocal bunch of disruptive people and others who don't know what that actual issue is but seemed like a good band wagon to jump on grrrr big business giving it to the man!

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

#85

Post by jcranmer »

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?

This isn't against XHTML 1.1, which was HTML 4.01 shoved into a container of "if it isn't valid XML, display an error page instead;" rather, a lot of the hate is against XHTML 2.0, which decided to rip out HTML features such as forms, frames, most of the old elements such as or , and generally screw compatibility completely.

For a reaction from a browser developer, see https://dbaron.org/log/20090707-ex-html

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

#86

Post by chrisseaton »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #80
userbinator wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reac…

> Sure the core team works for Google, but they make all the decisions, not Google.

If the core team works for Google then Google is making all the decisions.

A company is the people working there making the decisions. A company can't make decisions without the people there doing so.

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

#87

Post by dragonwriter »

boomlinde wrote: post #48
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... 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…

> 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 concerns

That was a major focus of HTML5, as well, which was more successful at enabling that (arguably, it was more of the focus of HTML5, Which didn't try to impose major syntactic change as well, even though it also supported an XML form.)

> On a side note, now that the web development industry seems to have collectively given up any ambitions for semantically sound documents

Semantic soundness in the strict sense has always been something of a niche concern, not something hat was a general web dev industy goal and then abandoned.

> it's strange that the criticism against table-based layouts prevails.

Table-based layout remains an accessibility problem, which is a more practical issue than abstract concern for semantic soundness (though related).

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

#88

Post by dragonwriter »

geezerjay wrote: post #82
cygx wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like the complains are targetted at faulty implementations, not the document standard.

Yes, that the standard wasn't designed with the people actually implementing browsers and as a result was unusable for content in the real world whatever advantages it had in the theoretical world where it was widely and correctly implemented was a major problem.

Hence the “ivory tower” comment upthread.

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

#89

Post by cygx »

geezerjay wrote: post #82
cygx wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like the complains are targetted at faulty implementations, not the document standard.

What good is a standard you can't use in practice? There also were other issues: XHTML was chasing the dream of the semantic, well-formed, machine-readable web, but it didn't do enough to help with pragmatic problems web designers trying to deliver a product actually faced. As much as I like the idea myself from a theoretical perspective, the market had other priorities.

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

#90

Post by geezerjay »

klez wrote: post #11
jsgyx wrote: post #7

So W3C is signing to confirm their irrelevance?

FWIW, w3c publishes and standardize a lot more than just HTML and DOM. So calling it irrelevant seems a bit of a stretch.

I would also add that having third-parties propose specifications to standardization bodies is a widely established practice. In fact, standards are supposes to reflect industry practices and are a way to establish common ground.
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