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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

#121

Post by kevingadd »

danarmak wrote: post #91
klez wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That no browser maker recognizes W3C's standard is a bit misleading. MDN (i.e. Mozilla) quotes the w3c recommendations all over the place. Google, from what I found around, cites nothing, not even WHATWG. Webkit cites MDN (which cites w3c) as a source.

If I complain to Mozilla that they deviate from the W3C spec in some respect, will they treat that as a bug, or will they more likely say "no-one implements this, so no website uses this, so we have no reason to be the first to implement this because we don't think this is part of the spec is really important"?

Depends on the deviance. If it's 'this was changed in the whatwg spec' the answer will probably be 'the next w3c spec will document this change, for now here's '. If the deviance breaks production apps sometimes Mozilla will roll it back, it's happened before. In other cases they'll treat it as a bug and fix it.

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

#122

Post by amyjess »

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…

I honestly don't think either was the purpose. XHTML existed to make parsing easier.

The only things you couldn't do in XHTML 1.1 Transitional that you could do in HTML were having unclosed tags and using uppercase in tag names. That's it.

Now yeah, the strict version tried to force you into semantically sound documents... but that was completely orthogonal to XHTML vs. HTML. Both XHTML and HTML were available in both transitional and strict forms.

The real problem is that HTML is a massive pain in the ass to parse. You can close tags out of order, some tags can't even be closed (), some tags can optionally be closed (

), nothing is case-sensitive, and because of how flexible SGML is, you need a DTD to properly parse any SGML implementation (fun fact: SGML allows for a bunch of different markup styles, but the HTML DTD explicitly disallows most of them). XHTML sought to eliminate all that by mapping HTML onto XML, which was much easier to parse.

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

#124

Post by hungryfoolish »

gsnedders wrote: post #53
hungryfoolish wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not like anybody of us voted for W3C either You have more of a voice in the W3C than any other standards body (you can comment on the github issues, or join as an invited expert etc). The W3C was created by Tim Berners-Lee, if anyone should have a vote on how web standards are run, then the creator of the web should be one of the contenders for it. >And the W3C had stalled progress so much in the 00s and 10s No…

> You have more of a voice in the W3C than any other standards body (you can comment on the github issues, or join as an invited expert etc). That's… not any different to the WHATWG. You can comment on GitHub issues there just fine too. (And you can't just join as an invited expert for the W3C, but even being an invited expert means relatively little in most groups.) > The W3C was created by Tim Berners-Lee, if anyon…

>You can comment on GitHub issues there just fine too.

Yes, but (and you can disagree with me here) the W3C has much better international participation and say in standards. I know you can just file github comments, but none of the world has any real way to oppose any development that the whatwg makers have proposed. There doesn't seem to be any consensus forming or way to really oppose any development apart from filing a github issue. All the editors are pretty much from one company, which feels like handing over control of the web to that one company essentially.

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

#125

Post by amyjess »

jcranmer wrote: post #85
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?

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

XHTML 2.0 also did screwy stuff with MIME types I believe. It required specific MIME types that a lot of browsers at the time didn't support, and because of that most browsers would straight-up refuse to render XHTML 2.0.

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

#126

Post by bzbarsky »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #65
stupidcar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Standard" = consensus definition of desired behaviour. "Living" = open to change. I don't see what is so oxymoronic about this? Just because a consensus has been reached doesn't mean that consensus must be immutable. Just because the process of standardisation in some technical domains has tended to use versioned documents doesn't mean that such an approach is fundamental to standardisation.

The point is that HTML is almost 30 years old, and based on SGML which is much older (even though ISO 8879 is officially "only" from 1986), where SGML is just a formalization of typesetting practices established in the 1960's and 1970's. Given the depth of usage of HTML in everyday life (laws, contracts in ecommerce, medical records, personal communication, education, etc., etc.), I think HTML deserves better than be…

The markup parts of HTML (e.g. the parsing) are pretty frozen and have been for a while. This is the part that can sort of argue it used to be based on SGML (though now it's not, for various reasons).

The "HTML spec" includes a lot of APIs and processing model details that need tweaking as new constraints come up. A good example is that a lot of APIs that involve cross-window access need changes to their specifications in a process-per-origin world; the old spec text assumes everything can always be done synchronously, but that's not actually possible in that world as far as I can tell.

This, and fixing security bugs in the spec that get found from time to time are far from "no good reasons"!

None of the recent HTML spec changes would have affected "wellformedness" of an existing document in the markup sense. They're mostly about fixing spec bugs (in that the spec doesn't match what web sites expect!) in complicated areas like security, navigation, etc.

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

#127

Post by maeln »

ChrisSD wrote: post #106
cygx wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

But that's kind of the point, we had to do a lot of things that just "worked" because we didn't have the tool that were considered standard in almost any other GUI toolkit.

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

#128

Post by domenicd »

Athas wrote: post #3

This looks like W3C capitulating: > WHATWG maintains the HTML and DOM Living Standards Which is understandable, since all of the main implementers of HTML are active in WHATWG, not so much W3C. What will be the concrete impact of this agreement?

The biggest concrete impact, in my opinion, will be the removal of confusion in the web developer community around where things are specified. Currently W3C forks (https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Fork_tracking) are often linked to as authoritative, or misleading show up in Google search results higher than the document they are forked from.

Per the Memorandum of Understanding at https://www.w3.org/2019/04/WHATWG-W3C-MOU.html#transition, after the W3C first marks a WHATWG Review Draft as a W3C Recommendation, all the forks will be marked as "Superceded" with redirects to the WHATWG originals.

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

#129

Post by Ajedi32 »

userbinator wrote: post #52
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.

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…

> My personal opinion on this is to stop feeding the monopoly and refuse to use anything other than basic HTML for static content sites.

That's not going to work for one simple reason: despite HN's obsession with plain HTML/CSS, these new standards _are_ actually useful. They're being created with the express purpose of solving practical problems that developers, site operators, and users are experiencing in the real world. Those stakeholders aren't going to just ignore a practical solution to their problem over some esoteric concerns about "feeding the monopoly".

I share your concerns about the proliferation of web standards making it difficult for browser vendors to compete, but if the only alternative you can offer is stagnation I think it's completely unsurprising that your concerns go unheeded.

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

#130

Post by bzbarsky »

austincheney wrote: post #40
coldtea wrote: post #27

Earlier 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.

As someone who was involved in some of the W3C work at the time, it's not clear to what extent they were focused on "security" at all.
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