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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

#281

Post by jandrese »

rangerpolitic wrote: post #272
jandrese wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give us a link to your elegant table-less IE5 supporting website? I would like to see how you achieved it. I lost a lot of hair trying to make a simple 3 column layout where the middle column would scale to the width of the window and could consist of multiple DIVs in a vertical row, all of the same width. AKA "baby's first blog" layout. Something that should have been one of the design cases for CSS.

> Can you give us a link to your elegant table-less IE5 supporting website? I cannot. They no longer exist. This was 14 years ago. I left web development shortly afterwards. For your example, horizontal alignment was easy. One container div with a width of 99.9% and a left/right margin of auto. Inside you place three divs (columns) with a width of 33.3% and float left. Add another div at the end to clear the float. V…

You don't want the sidebars to scale with the screen though, just the middle. And as I recall the obvious solution of just setting a fixed width on the two outer divs and letting the middle one autoscale didn't work for some stupid reason. Maybe because they scaled to the content, not the width of the remaining space.

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

#282

Post by amyjess »

spiralx wrote: post #279
amyjess wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bot…

Could you have unquoted attributes in transitional?

Ah, I just checked, and no you can't. So I guess that's a third difference. Thanks for the correction!

Another correction I noticed when looking that up: I meant to say XHTML 1.0 Transitional, not 1.1. 1.1 was Strict-only.

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

#283

Post by domenicd »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #264
domenicd wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is a good point, yes. Arguably it should have been left in as a void element with no behavior to avoid parsing issues of the sort you describe... That's what we did, actually :). Parsing behavior was unchanged. Ctrl+F "keygen" in https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html .

You do realize that spontaneously editing the spec to drop, then re-introduce an element buried in a git commit is exactly the reason why WHATWG is an unreliable source for a definite HTML reference, don't you? Especially when it goes unnoticed even by experts such as GP. At the same time, you want to claim authoritative control over HTML, yet show no sign of respecting other established standards and standard bodies…

I'm not sure what you mean by drop and then re-introduce, buried in a Git commit. We made a single commit to remove keygen, after displaying a public deprecation-will-be-removed notice in the spec for some years. Dropping keygen was part of a highly-public pull request, which gathered discussion from all browser vendors, as well as interested community members. The pull request was only merged once all four browser vendors supported removal (2 had already removed by that point).

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

#284

Post by devit »

userbinator wrote: post #249
devit wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the browser engines and most browsers are open source, so making them harder to implement does not "feed the monopoly".

The fact that the source is open doesn't say anything about difficulty of implementation; in fact, being open-source probably increases the monopolising effect, since now people will be more inclined to think "that implementation is open-source, I'll just use/contribute to it instead of starting another independent one."

It might create a monopoly of browser engines, but not a monopoly of browser vendors, which is the harmful part (of course we might be heading to a browser vendor monopoly anyway, but that's due to Google abusing their market position, not the complexity of HTML).

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

#285

Post by olliej »

austincheney wrote: post #270
olliej wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fair point. I was conflating whatwg spec and html5 (Actually, it's possible they were at one point the same spec - there was some work over the last 5 or so years to stop putting literally everything in a single spec document, unfortunately after a decade of web engine work everything turns into a single amorphous blob)

They were never the same. The closest thing is that the DOM spec and W3C’s XML Schema spec were joint publications for several years.

What are you talking about? I am not talking about the W3C's nonsense, I was fairly clear that I was talking about the actual real spec, which is html5, via the WHATWG [1]

What you claimed is absolutely wrong.

Please note that it defines the DOM interfaces for all of the core elements, and more or less every DOM API, including all elements, as well as most programmatic types - even things like the XHR objects. They used to all be in a single giant "HTML living standard" document, and have in the relatively recent past been split into separate spec docs (many of which reference the original "living standard").

[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org

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

#286

Post by spiralx »

amyjess wrote: post #282
spiralx wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you have unquoted attributes in transitional?

Ah, I just checked, and no you can't. So I guess that's a third difference. Thanks for the correction! Another correction I noticed when looking that up: I meant to say XHTML 1.0 Transitional, not 1.1. 1.1 was Strict-only.

And thinking about it weren't value-less attributes also illegal? I remember doing a lot of

    ...
in XHTML, instead of

    ...
in HTML.

Even SGML has problems with expressing an attribute like that from what I remember reading of someone's attempt to specify HTML 5 using an SGML DTD.

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

#287

Post by austincheney »

olliej wrote: post #285
austincheney wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were never the same. The closest thing is that the DOM spec and W3C’s XML Schema spec were joint publications for several years.

What are you talking about? I am not talking about the W3C's nonsense, I was fairly clear that I was talking about the actual real spec, which is html5, via the WHATWG [1] What you claimed is absolutely wrong. Please note that it defines the DOM interfaces for all of the core elements, and more or less every DOM API, including all elements, as well as most programmatic types - even things like the XHR objects. They u…

The WHATWG DOM spec was spun out of W3C DOM level 3. Neither document was ever associated with or aligned to any version of HTML, though the WHATWG did try something like that and backed off when all the browser vendors refused to give them the time of day. Now the WHATWG document is largely the document of record and W3Cs DOM level 4 is largely a snapshot of the WHATWG document.

None of this is either confusing or a mystery. It’s all out there in the open and the people who maintain these documents respond to email. I typically avoid talking about the DOM online because many developers aren’t aware of what it is and are less aware of its history and sometimes people get sensitive about it.

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