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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

#161

Post by goto11 »

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…

XHTML documents have exactly the same semantics as HTML. Neither is more semantically sound than the other.

XHTML just defined a slightly different syntax which was XML compatible. This was useful if you were using XML tools, but it didn't affect semantics at all.

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

#162

Post by austincheney »

mynegation wrote: post #114
austincheney wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You are already downvoted into oblivion and rightfully so, but I just wanted to add my perspective as a backend developer (and the one who did post-graduate level mathematical stuff at that) who now manages a team of back and front end developers and plays with front end development for toy projects. The sheer amount of complexity and required knowledge for front end development is simply baffling to me. These folks…

Stop being offended and have some objectivity. I am a front end developer and I am describing myself as much as anyone else.

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

#163

Post by austincheney »

oldjokes wrote: post #81
austincheney wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Calm down and stop crying. I am a front end developer and I was describing myself as well as my peers.

If you only wish to contribute hostility and rage to a conversation perhaps you need to take a break and consider some empathy.

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

#164

Post by snek »

To clarify why WHATWG exists and why W3C lost power over the HTML spec:

Around 2004 W3C abandoned organizational effort on HTML in favor of things like XHTML2, XEvents, semantic web, etc. The WHATWG was formed in reaction to that, rewriting HTML completely from its W3C HTML 4.0 version for example to make it better for web applications and to specify things in more detail.

Since the formation of WHATWG, W3C HTML specs became copy-pastes (often not even correct copy-pastes) in an effort to satisfy paying member companies (https://github.com/w3c/charter-html/issues/14#issuecomment-1...).

You can see everything WHATWG maintains here: https://platform.html5.org/ (they are the green question mark)

The W3C still maintains a good chunk web standards though, such as CSS, Wasm, web security, etc.

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

#165

Post by zeven7 »

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.

The thing that makes the web different and why the idea of a living standard makes sense for the web is because (by and large) web changes can't break backwards compatibility. Browser vendors are unwilling to make changes that will break existing websites because it could result in losing market share as users switch to browsers that still work for those websites. So anything currently in the standard today is expected to continue working tomorrow. That means even though the standard may change regularly, you can depend on anything that it currently says to keep working.

The idea of versioned standards is only really important if you have to worry about things changing out from under you that could break your existing work.

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

#166

Post by austincheney »

officialchicken wrote: post #92
austincheney wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

While jaded, I don't think your reasoning is valid. If the question is, "Why suspect an organization to coordinate with another to establish a dominant position in manufacturing or standardization in order to create a barrier to entry/monopoly for potential competitors?" I'm pretty sure the answer has nothing to do with web developers, even if that's the subject at hand in the context of this question.

My reasoning is primarily a consideration of where pressure and redirection of web standards originates. For example consider how classes landed in ES6. The maintainers of the standard didn’t want classes, but hands down they were the single most requested feature of that specification.

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

#167

Post by tinus_hn »

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.

HTML has always been poorly defined and has mostly been a description of de facto standards since forever. It takes a lot of leverage to make the browser vendors follow any kind of specification.

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

#168

Post by [deleted] »

snek wrote: post #164

To clarify why WHATWG exists and why W3C lost power over the HTML spec: Around 2004 W3C abandoned organizational effort on HTML in favor of things like XHTML2, XEvents, semantic web, etc. The WHATWG was formed in reaction to that, rewriting HTML completely from its W3C HTML 4.0 version for example to make it better for web applications and to specify things in more detail. Since the formation of WHATWG, W3C HTML spec…

[deleted]

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

#169

Post by ori_b »

panic wrote: post #59
skrebbel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/p…

> It's hard to overstate how important this sort of compatibility work has been to the strength of the modern web.

There are fewer compatible browsers than at any time in the past 20 years.

The compatibility problem has been solved by drowning browser maintainers in complexity and convincing them to give up. All the small browsers lack the manpower to implement the rapidly churning spec. This leaves the Google-funded Firefox and the Google-funded Chromium in the space.

Compatibility has been solved by reducing the web to a monoculture, with a puppet competitor to avoid monopoly issues.

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

#170

Post by austincheney »

inlined wrote: post #99
austincheney wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

And yet, I can build world scale cloud systems but can’t build a web front end anymore to save my life. I’m blown away by the sheer complexity that has evolved in frontend code. Developers there have such a broad toolset and arcane knowledge about how you really need to combine two CSS traits on surrounding containers to get the positioning you want. Unfortunately, in our industry, most engineers think the layer abov…

I agree that the frontend landscape is too complex, but much of that is self imposed. Most developers on the client side refuse to string two lines of code together without a framework or large abstraction library. Offers of reducing complexity such as removing unnecessary decoration in the code or returning to a standards driven approach is often met with hostility. Much of this complexity is the result of striving for comfort and easiness. Simplicity isn’t easy.

As an example consider this recent comment that was upvoted 11 times and some of the responses to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20021708

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