Google is killing the open web, part 2

They both were just responding to similar market demands because end users didn't want to use RSS. Users want to use social media instead.

>This is a trillion-dollar ad company who has been actively destroying the open web for over a decade

Google has both done more for and invested more into progressing the open web than anyone else.

>The WHATWG aim is to turn the Web into an application delivery platform

This is what web developers want and browsers our reacting to the natural demands of developers, who are reacting to demands of users. It was an evolutionary process that got it to that state.

>but with their dependency on the Blink rendering engine, controlled by Google, they won't be able to do anything but cave

Blink is open source and modular. Maintaining a fork is much less effort than the alternative of maintaining a different browser engine.

The fact that you put "contract" in quotes suggests that you know there really is no such thing.

Backwards compatibility is a feature. One that needs to be actively valued, developed and maintained. It requires resources. There really is no "the web platform." We have web browsers, servers, client devices, telecommunications infrastructure - including routers and data centres, protocols... all produced and maintained by individual parties that are trying to achieve various degrees of interoperability between each other and all of which have their own priorities, values and interests.

The fact that the Internet has been able to become what it is, despite the foundational technologies that it was built upon - none of which had anticipated the usage requirements placed on their current versions, really ought to be labelled one of the wonders of the world.

I learned to program in the early to mid 1990s. Back then, there was no "cloud", we didn't call anything a "web application" but I cut my teeth doing the 1990s equivalent of building online tools and "web apps." Because everything was self-hosted, the companies I worked for valued portability because there was customer demand. Standardization was sought as a way to streamline business efficiency. As a young developer, I came to value standardization for the benefits that it offered me as a developer.

But back then, as well as today, if you looked at the very recent history of computing; you had big endian vs little endian CPUs to support, you had a dozen flavours of proprietary UNIX operating systems - each with their own vendor-lock-in features; while SQL was standard, every single RDBMS vendor had their own proprietary features that they were all too happy for you to use in order to try and lock consumers into their systems.

It can be argued that part of what has made Microsoft Windows so popular throughout the ages is the tremendous amount of effort that Microsoft goes through to support backwards compatibility. But even despite that effort, backwards compatibility with applications built for earlier version of Windows can still be hit or miss.

For better or worse, breaking changes are just part and parcel of computing. To try and impose some concept of a "contract" on the Internet to support backwards compatibility, even if you mean it purely figuratively, is a bit silly. The reason we have as much backwards compatibility as we do is largely historical and always driven by business goals and requirements, as dictated by customers. If only an extreme minority of "customers" require native xslt support in the web browser, to use today's example, it makes zero business sense to pour resources into maintaining it.

What, to you, would constitute sufficient proof? Is it feasible to gather the evidence your suggestion would require?