I once suggested that W3C base its HTML snapshots on the web developer edition of HTML. In retrospect the full version was probably not a good fit as a W3C standard in the first place.
Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec
221–230 of 386 posts
Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Writing an HTML5 parser takes thousands of developers 5 years. This is demonstrably untrue. Servo's HTML5 parser, html5ever, was largely written by a single developer within a year. (Yes, it's not a month, but it's also not 5 years.)
And wouldn’t it have been easier to write it without any of the leniency it has to expose? Wouldn’t it have been easier if all tags were either ending in /> or followed by a closing tag? Wouldn’t it have been easier if the syntax was formally defined as ABNF, and could be translated into code in a matter of days? I believe it would have been. And I believe that making the web easier machine readable, and making it ea…
> Wouldn’t it have been easier if all tags were either ending in /> or followed by a closing tag?
Not really.
> Wouldn’t it have been easier if the syntax was formally defined as ABNF, and could be translated into code in a matter of days?
No, working from an spec written as an algorithm is easier than working from ABNF plus some inconvenient prose constraints.
(With the exception of template element support, I wrote the HTML parser used in Firefox and Validator.nu.)
Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was a child in elementary school, a standards committee decided to change my native language. They replaced the spelling of most words, and many grammatical rules. We were forced to obey these changes, any use of the old rules was counted as mistake in school. Back then, many older books were still using the old rules. By the time I left high school, almost no books with the old rules were left. All had been r…
Apples and oranges - when you introduce a government mandate, you remove the market. @tptacek's aregument is clearly about market forces in publicly defined standards, not government enforced ones. I'm pretty sure the last thing anyone really wants is what we'd wind up with if web standards were left to government dictates...
There’s no need for a government to enforce standards on the web – there’s already an oligopoly that can do it on their own.
In fact, there’s a single company that can just outright dictate web standards, because they hold almost 70% of the browser market: Google.
Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know of an article, sorry. A brief history from memory would be that during XHTML days the W3C essentially let the HTML spec languish and people weren't moving to XHTML (at best they were moving to XHTML-like HTML). So the WHATWG came along (mainly organised by the major browser vendors) and started the HTML spec moving again. This became part of what's known as HTML5. However WHATWG doesn't exactly make a "s…
> The WHATWG has always opposed the W3C's spec. They see it as confusing to have two "official" specifications. As the old joke goes... if it hurts, they should stop doing that! The WHATWG spec is worse than useless to me as a developer. It's impossible to tell what is usable and what is just Google's wishlist (which is about half of it). The MDN has entirely replaced it for me, since they at least do a good job of d…
> Leave the business of documenting what browsers actually conform to to the W3C.
Documenting the prevailing conditions is very much not the purpose of a standard.
Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
MDN includes clear documentation about what is actually implemented in all major browsers (the compatibility tables), so I (as someone who wants my code to work everywhere now , not next year ) can tell at a glance what pie-in-the-sky ideas I should ignore. That's great that it's based on the WHATWG's work – it should be, since it should document what's in Firefox, and Firefox presumably is following their own work w…
FWIW, the HTML Standard (not the DOM Standard) does include CanIUse information in a sidebar, to help with this. I'd like to include this into other WHATWG standards, but it hasn't really happened yet. I'd expect most web developers to use MDN and StackOverflow though, as you say.
I appreciate the attempt to include compatibility tables, but they're nowhere near detailed enough for serious usage. Take the canvas element as an example. The WHATWG spec has one "CanIUse" sidebar for basically each section, if that. But compatibility issues exist at the level of individual methods. E.g. .filter and .resetTransform() both have very low cross-platform support ([1] and [2]), which I can tell at a glance from MDN, both in the sidebar listing them, and the compatibility tables on each page. Whereas the WHATWG spec doesn't even mention that these are experimental ([3] and [4]), and the CanIUse sidebar is totally absent for them.
StackOverflow is not a reference, and the answers for even popular queries are sometimes a decade out of date.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CanvasRende...
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CanvasRende...
[3] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/canvas.html#dom-context-2d-...
[4] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/canvas.html#transformations
Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does say that they are members of the W3C organization.
So could I. I mean, I see what you mean, but to a casual observer that's not very clear.
Your objection is funny. Other methods of communication could be faked. Here you have Github as an authority to check membership and the organisation's repositories as an official place of discussion (perhaps equivalent to the website).
You do have to trust that the org is legitimate, but you could also fake a website or a whole organisaion.
Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you look at the list of members? Who on the list is going to be building their own browser and what would the business case be? Out of the big four, only two of them even thought it made sense to build a browser from scratch. Apple and Google started off with KHTML. EDIT: To clarify. Who is going to be building their own rendering engine instead of taking an existing one - 3 of the 4 are open source - and buildin…
"Who is going to be building their own rendering engine instead of taking an existing one" Just for the note: I did - https://sciter.com It was not meant to render all possible pages from Wild World Web but it renders HTML5/CSS3 (some subsets but still).
Awesome! How would you compare your product to Electron?
Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This simply is not true. The web moved to an XHTML-like dialect of HTML You're thinking of XHTML 1.1 or XHTML 2. That "XHTML-dialect" that everyone switched to was called "XHTML 1.0", which allowed serving as either content type. If you're choosing to nitpick about the fact that most sites published would not have worked if served as application/xhtml+xml, I'd invite you to do a survey of sites currently being serv…
OK, so by lucideer's quirky definition of "XHTML", the vast majority of the web moved to XHTML. Based on the expansiveness of lucideer's definition, this appear to have encompassed web developers who probably weren't even aware they were writing "XHTML". By the definition that most of us are using, which is that XHTML is complaint XHTML that could be rendered without error in browser's XHTML modes, to a first approxi…
> by lucideer's quirky definition
Which also happens to be the definition the w3c xhtml 1.0 spec. You can choose to think that's quirky, please don't attribute it to me.
> definition that most of us are using, which is that XHTML is complaint XHTML that could be rendered without error in browser's XHTML modes
Which, again, is the definition used in the later w3c xhtml 1.1 & 2 specs, the former which wasn't widely used, the latter which was abandoned without being published at all.
If your issue with XHTML was that W3C were moving towards a direction you disagreed with, then you don't have an issue with the version of XHTML that was in popular use.
> XHTML-levels of precision in HTML requires an awful lot of API support and very careful usage
I'm not really sure where this view comes from. HTML validation is a lot more complex and difficult to achieve than XML well formedness, and HTML4/XHTML1 validation were both far simpler than modern HTML5 validation (the Nu validator is inordinately complex in comparison to the older DTD one). Furthermore, dev tools for ensuring XML well-formedness are far more readily available and integrated into most things even today, while HTML5 validation is such an obscure concept today I'm sure many devs don't even know it's a thing.
Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
What language is this? This sounds fascinating.
My example was the implementation of the German orthography and language reforms between 1996 and 2006 (I went to elementary school in 2002, when implementing it was still in progress, and most stuff was still using the old spelling, I left high school in 2014). But French has their Academy, which has even more power over language, and afaik, Spain supposedly has similar governing bodies.
Meh- the French Academy has power over prescriptive grammar sure, but it has almost no power over what descriptive linguistics finds. Lots of Arabic and Verlan has made its way into everyday parlance.
I'm not really sure that the French Academy is really that much more effective than Strunk & White is for English speakers. It primarily seems to be ceremonial / an expression of French pride.
Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec
#230We know that Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, consider the WHATWG to be the canonical version. We don't yet know whether the other 450+ W3C member organisations that represent the wider web platform agree with this position or not though. Honestly, do the other 450+ W3C member organizations matter? ( https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List )
> Honestly, do the other 450+ W3C member organizations matter? Well, the four objectors are responsible for browser engines that cover somewhere between 95 and 99+% of browser usage, depending on which set of stats you use and whether you count other browsers that have Chromium or Firefox upstream, including the system browsers of every major mobile and desktop OS. So, no, in practice if those four agree on something…
Remember that Apple just implemented the Canvas tag. If you implement something good perhaps almost none of the W3C member organisations matter in pushing something.