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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

#141

Post by geezerjay »

dragonwriter wrote: post #88
geezerjay wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the complains are targetted at faulty implementations, not the document standard.

Yes, that the standard wasn't designed with the people actually implementing browsers and as a result was unusable for content in the real world whatever advantages it had in the theoretical world where it was widely and correctly implemented was a major problem. Hence the “ivory tower” comment upthread.

The expression "ivory tower" has an entirely different meaning. Just because the couple of dominant players chose to ignore a standard, particularly in a time and age where they were outright hostile to interoperability initiatives, it doesn't mean the standard was not reasonable.

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

#142

Post by domenicd »

hungryfoolish wrote: post #137
domenicd wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The main restriction here is people willing to volunteer. We have tons of specs desperate for more maintenance work. If you'd like to get involved, please do so, and if you can spend significant amount of time on any of them, I imagine their current editors would be happy to add you to the team. (I certainly would, for the specs I edit.) You can get started at https://github.com/search?q=is%3Aopen+label%3A%22good+first+....

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

#143

Post by hungryfoolish »

domenicd wrote: post #136
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.

> 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 t…

>Overall, I think the WHATWG structure, of being open to input from all (instead of pay-to-play),

Thats not entirely fair. The WHATWG is also pay-to-play in a way - the browser makers have disproportionally higher power, even more so than the w3c model where there is at least some form of consensus forming among a group of people with more international representation. Now technically anyone in the world can open a github issue (w3c also does it though now), but thats about what anyone can do to oppose something in the spec that the browser makers have their hearts set on.

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

#144

Post by lucideer »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #129
userbinator wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> these new standards _are_ actually useful

I don't necessarily disagree, but it would help your case if you includes some examples in your comment (if only to build a discussion upon).

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

#145

Post by stephenr »

irrational wrote: post #102
chrisseaton wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

AMP, WebUSB, WebBluetooth all indicate otherwise.

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

#146

Post by domenicd »

hungryfoolish wrote: post #143
domenicd wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

>Overall, I think the WHATWG structure, of being open to input from all (instead of pay-to-play), Thats not entirely fair. The WHATWG is also pay-to-play in a way - the browser makers have disproportionally higher power, even more so than the w3c model where there is at least some form of consensus forming among a group of people with more international representation. Now technically anyone in the world can open a g…

Hmm, you seem to have skipped over some of my points.

The WHATWG is open to input from all, but only things browsers are willing to ship get into the specs. So yes, that's more power. No disputing that. But I would rather not have specs full of unimplemnted fiction, even if that fiction has consensus among paying member companies.

The W3C is not open to input from all. If you open a GitHub issue contributing an idea, but do not pay member fees, they cannot incorporate your idea into the spec, because of Intellectual Property Rights concerns. There is no way in the W3C to say "I sign over my IPR rights" without also paying thousands of dollars per year.

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

#147

Post by underbluewaters »

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…

This is not remotely true anymore. I can remember times when browser updates broke site functionality, but that was a decade ago (longer?) when we were still coding for specific bugs in Internet Explorer 6.

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

#148

Post by gsnedders »

sureaboutthis wrote: post #133
ChrisSD wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

In most cases, if your code has some syntax error, the author of the code sees the syntax error; in the web case, if your code has some syntax error, the user sees the syntax error. That's the dramatic difference.

The other reality is unlike program code, there's vastly more often user content intermixed in (X)HTML and it's rare for people to implement sanitisation correctly (do you handle U+0000? U+FFFF? U+1FFFF? most people outputting XHTML historically haven't, even if they get the security critical stuff (like "<") right).

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

#149

Post by gsnedders »

domenicd wrote: post #146
hungryfoolish wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Overall, I think the WHATWG structure, of being open to input from all (instead of pay-to-play), Thats not entirely fair. The WHATWG is also pay-to-play in a way - the browser makers have disproportionally higher power, even more so than the w3c model where there is at least some form of consensus forming among a group of people with more international representation. Now technically anyone in the world can open a g…

Hmm, you seem to have skipped over some of my points. The WHATWG is open to input from all, but only things browsers are willing to ship get into the specs. So yes, that's more power. No disputing that. But I would rather not have specs full of unimplemnted fiction, even if that fiction has consensus among paying member companies. The W3C is not open to input from all. If you open a GitHub issue contributing an idea,…

> There is no way in the W3C to say "I sign over my IPR rights" without also paying thousands of dollars per year.

Or, as you mention up-thread, get invited into the group by the chairs and with consent of the W3C staff. Which… is an opaque process, and totally non-obvious to an outsider.

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

#150

Post by outside1234 »

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,…

Also, I will say, some of the worst engineering I have ever seen has been on these allegedly superior engineers that work in AI and statistical analysis.

Maybe self reflection or hubris is the issue?

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