W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 28, 2019, 2:02 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#132

Post by domenicd » Tue, May 28, 2019, 2:04 PM UTC

hungryfoolish wrote: post #124

gsnedders wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fil…

> All the editors are pretty much from one company, which feels like handing over control of the web to that one company essentially.

Which company are you referring to? Per https://github.com/whatwg/sg/blob/master/Workstreams.md, I see

- 3 independent (Dom Farolino, Robert Kowalski, G. P. Hemsley)

- 2 Mozilla (Mike Taylor, Anne van Kesteren)

- 2 Google (Domenic Denicola, Philip Jägenstedt)

- 1 CloudFlare (Terrin Stock)

- 1 Bocoup (Simon Pieters)

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

#133

Post by sureaboutthis » Tue, May 28, 2019, 2:04 PM UTC

ChrisSD wrote: post #66

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?

IIRC, the main objection was that error handling was an all or nothing affair. Whereas most HTML on the web is (or was) broken to a greater or lesser degree. There was also the objection that stricter parsing made it harder for hobbyists. In these days of Typescript, where web devs seem to like having stricter rules, it could play better. But that ship has already sailed.

I never understood that either except, as you said, for the hobbyist's sake. A lot of XHTML was generated from XML and, if one is using XML, chances are programming is involved in the transformation to XHTML. But programming has strict rules itself and will also fail if not adhered to so I never understood the complaint of "draconian" error checking in XML/XHTML.

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

#134

Post by notatoad » Tue, May 28, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

kevingadd wrote: post #112

_bxg1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People often forget two things: - Virtually none of these changes are breaking, by design. If you prefer the web of 1998, then as a web developer by and large you can pretend that's still the world we live in. - HTML itself has actually been a very small fraction of the "HTML5" (a silly marketing term) rapid iteration over the past decade. CSS has grown dramatically in power, and JS is hardly even the same language (…

"not breaking" is an aspirational goal, not remotely a fact. When browser vendors decide to ship a breaking change (and make no mistake, they do this multiple times a year - probably dozens to hundreds) they have to run live experiments to gather data on how many commonly-visited sites use a feature they're going to change or a quirk they're going to remove. Typically if the value is like 1% or above the change is ki…

> When browser vendors decide to ship a breaking change (and make no mistake, they do this multiple times a year - probably dozens to hundreds)

can you share an example of a breaking change to HTML that a browser has intentionally shipped in the last year?

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

#135

Post by fiatjaf » Tue, May 28, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

cotelletta wrote: post #26

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.

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…

Exactly. And the same people who keep producing tons and tons of specs no one uses -- and even if anyone wants to use they're so complex it doesn't make any sense.

RDF, JSON-LD, "semantic web", piles and piles of garbage. And all written by the same group of 10 people who have never written a web app by themselves.

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

#136

Post by domenicd » Tue, May 28, 2019, 2:20 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #24

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".

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.

> WHATWG is basically the browser vendors sidelining W3C to discuss what features HTML etc should have.

One way of looking at it is who has final say what ends up in the documents. That seems to be what you're discussing.

In the W3C, that's the Director, Tim Berners-Lee. Except, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, he has delegated all his decision-making powers to W3C staff. So ultimately it is the W3C CEO and the folks he hires.

In the WHATWG, that's the browser vendors (i.e., the WHATWG Steering Group). I find the WHATWG model to make more sense, as I think what ends up in specs should match what the implementers plan to do; that makes for a more useful spec ecosystem for everyone. When you diverge too far from that model, you get circa-20004 W3C, i.e. XHTML 2, XForms, XEvents, etc.

A different way of looking at it is who contributes to the discussion and development of features. In the W3C, that's paying member companies (https://www.w3.org/Consortium/fees, $2.25-$77k/year in the US). Although anyone can comment on GitHub, to contribute ideas that get incorporated into the specification, you need to be a W3C member, for IPR reasons. (Or invited expert, but that has its own problems; see https://medium.com/@tobie/w3c-doesnt-help-its-invited-expert...) In the WHATWG, anyone can contribute; the IPR concerns are taken care of by signing an agreement, somewhat like an open-source project CLA, but that agreement does not require paying membership fees.

Overall, I think the WHATWG structure, of being open to input from all (instead of pay-to-play), with the spec tracking what browsers intend to implement (instead of tracking what W3C staff deems good), is a pretty great model for standardization.

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

#137

Post by hungryfoolish » Tue, May 28, 2019, 2:20 PM UTC

domenicd wrote: post #132

hungryfoolish wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 fil…

> All the editors are pretty much from one company, which feels like handing over control of the web to that one company essentially. Which company are you referring to? Per https://github.com/whatwg/sg/blob/master/Workstreams.md , I see - 3 independent (Dom Farolino, Robert Kowalski, G. P. Hemsley) - 2 Mozilla (Mike Taylor, Anne van Kesteren) - 2 Google (Domenic Denicola, Philip Jägenstedt) - 1 CloudFlare (Terrin St…

Okay, so they have added more people there than the last time I looked (which was pretty much all google except for 1 mozilla person). Thanks for pointing towards that link.

Still seems a pretty small group to control something so important, but I hope they keep improving and adding more people there from other companies and countries.

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

#138

Post by domenicd » Tue, May 28, 2019, 2:22 PM UTC

Folks may find the more-detailed blog post linked at https://www.w3.org/blog/2019/05/w3c-and-whatwg-to-work-toget... to be more clear.

Also, for the full details, here is a direct link to the agreement: https://www.w3.org/2019/04/WHATWG-W3C-MOU.html

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

#139

Post by boomlinde » Tue, May 28, 2019, 2:23 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #87

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…

> 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…

> 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.)

I agree. Don't confuse my interpretation of the point of XHTML with some sort of endorsement. For the record, I think XHTML is an unnecessarily complex standard that results in more work for little added value. I do recognize, though, that the point of XHTML is unrelated to its success to that end.

Comparing HTML5 to XHTML is also a bit of a no-brainer. There are 14 years between their introductions, and HTML5 obviously had a history of lessons learned from XHTML to take into account.

> 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.

What is the strict sense of semantic soundness? I'd agree that few people care about semantic soundness even in a general sense. I frequently see documents where the presentation seems prioritized over content. But the ambition did exist at some point, and was more of a mainstream concern in, say, 2005 than it seems to be now, and the idea of a more semantic web was peddled by big names like Tim Berners-Lee.

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

I'd say that they are strictly related. You improve accessibility primarily by improving the semantic representation of documents. I don't see semantic soundness as an "abstract concern" for this reason. The most useful screen readers unfortunately seem to rely on some level of guesswork to make verbal sense of documents that rely on spatiality to communicate element relationships.

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

#140

Post by dmitriid » Tue, May 28, 2019, 2:24 PM UTC

rangerpolitic wrote: post #95

cotelletta wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you miss the 5-10 years during which every CSS designer tortured themselves replicating tables with floats? Google 'pure css page footer' to see the wreckage. CSS tables took years to be supported, and even then, only brought back what people had been irrationally told to stay away from. It took another 5 years for flex box to become usable, adding something actually new. To this day, changing a site's entire des…

> Did you miss the 5-10 years during which every CSS designer tortured themselves replicating tables with floats? I never really understood why people had such difficulty with this. I was able to execute table-less layouts while still supporting IE5 on Mac. > To this day, changing a site's entire design without touching its markup is a mirage. That's only because HTML authoring is dead. No one writes HTML well these…

> Write well-structured, semantic HTML being mindful of a separation of concerns

I keep hearing about this mythical beast, and yet I have never seen one beyond the simplest of text-only blogs.