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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

#101

Post by [deleted] »

chrisseaton wrote: post #86
giancarlostoro wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#102

Post by irrational »

chrisseaton wrote: post #86
giancarlostoro wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe they are saying that the senior leadership at Google is evil, but the developers in the trenches are more benign in their intentions.

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

#103

Post by vorpalhex »

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.

Hopefully those aren't in contrast to each other. You can have a living document that gets consistent updates AND still has meaningful versions, much like a lot of well developed software.

The goal is for the time between HTML versions to not be a decade, but instead for consistent, incremental improvements without browsers trailing behind for years. At the same time, these should (hopefully) not be breaking changes.

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

#104

Post by _bxg1 »

Multicomp wrote: post #4

Extremely condensed version: W3C is giving up publishing future HTML and DOM standards. They will focus on writing 'recommendations' for the WHATWG's living standards. Versioned vs living HTML discussions aside, I personally admit some mild sadness that the original group responsible for maintaining Sir TBL's work on HTML has been forced to give up.

It is a sad day, but for a long time now W3C has been a figurehead and nothing more. It was like Japan's modern-day emperor. It carried no weight to actually contradict the WHATWG's version of things. So it's simply acknowledging that fact.

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

#105

Post by boomlinde »

protonfish wrote: post #75
boomlinde wrote: post #48

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. 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 e…

> You keep repeating "semantically sound" but I can't fathom what that means in your context.

Documents built on the principle that their structure should relate to the meaning of their content rather than its presentation are what I consider "semantically sound". By negative example, an HTML document filled with div pyramids just to apply layout information, and obtuse class and id names are not what I consider semantically sound. However clumsy it was in practice, XHTML and CSS sought to address this by making the markup extensible and moving style information out of the document.

> I never saw any indication that XHTML brought significant practical semantic information or standardization over what HTML5 can do.

Obviously HTML5 had the advantage of hindsight and the perspective to learn from some of the mistakes of XHTML while adopting some of its more useful qualities. I should also note that I'm discussing the point of XHTML, not trying to tell anyone that it was particularly successful to that end. Don't confuse the two.

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

#106

Post by ChrisSD »

cygx wrote: post #97
ChrisSD wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

`display: table` has been around since around 2001/02, for exactly that reason. However IE didn't support it until IE8.

However IE didn't support it until IE8. Which got released in 2009, but took another year to overtake IE6+7 in market share. This means `display:table` was of limited usefulness for nearly a decade after its introduction...

Sure but that's a different issue. It's not the fault of the standard if a major browser doesn't implement it.

In practice I was using display table in some designs in the mid 00's but also using conditional stylesheets to hack an IE layout. This was not a particularly good solution but it "worked".

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

#108

Post by cygx »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #96
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see this connection of XHTML and semweb. The preamble to the original XML spec reads as follows: > The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML that is completely described in this document. Its goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with bot…

I don't see this connection of XHTML and semweb

XHTML continued the spirit of HTML 4 strict, getting rid of presentational elements and replacing them with 'sematic' ones. Eventually, you were also supposed to combine it with RDF to embed machine-readable metadata into your documents (cf https://www.w3.org/2003/03/rdf-in-xml.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML%2BRDFa ).

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

#109

Post by domenicd »

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.

A better resources is https://wpt.fyi/, which contains comprehensive test results in all browser engines. These days, at least for WHATWG specs, tests are required before any changes land in the specification, so wpt.fyi will necessarily contain all browser support for all features landed in the specs.

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

#110

Post by domenicd »

scarcelycoher wrote: post #51
martin_a wrote: post #22

Maybe it's just me, but I've never heard about the WHATWG before. And for everybody like me, that acronym stands for "Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group".

And it's pronounced more or less like "wat-woo-g"

https://whatwg.org/faq#spell-and-pronounce
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