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Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

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Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#51

Post by kuschku »

tptacek wrote: post #41
kuschku wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re assuming XHTML1.1 would never have evolved further, never have gotten more content. And Flash, despite its flaws, would have been a much better starting point for rich content than the ecosystem we have today. Many of the features Flash provided are only available in browsers today through babel.js transpilation. As result, we’re stuck with a language without stdlib and broken syntax. We’re stuck with a docume…

The idea that standards groups exist to push for top-down reconcepting of how the world should work is a common one, and is also a good reason why standards groups fail. Your idea of what the best outcome is won't be the same as every other stakeholders, and no one stakeholder will have exactly the same idea of the best outcome as the market will. Ultimately, the market will win, no matter what your standards group s…

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 reprinted. All newspapers had switched. Autocorrect programs had been updated with the new rules as well.

In a matter of 8 years, an entire language had changed its orthography and parts of its grammar, top-down, and it worked out fine.

I’m sorry, if an entire human language with 120 million speakers can be updated top-down like that, a web spec can as well.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#53

Post by tptacek »

kuschku wrote: post #51
tptacek wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that standards groups exist to push for top-down reconcepting of how the world should work is a common one, and is also a good reason why standards groups fail. Your idea of what the best outcome is won't be the same as every other stakeholders, and no one stakeholder will have exactly the same idea of the best outcome as the market will. Ultimately, the market will win, no matter what your standards group s…

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…

That sounds horrible.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#54

Post by kuschku »

chrisseaton wrote: post #50
kuschku wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh? How many tools do you know that can parse a current HTML5 react app without importing any existing browser? Every tool we have to use on the web relies on 4 existing tools that only major companies can build. I’ll pay you $100 if you manage to write, in 4 weeks, a browser, from scratch, that renders a real life React app accurately, including all content, without importing a single bit of code or libraries from e…

You asked about innovation, not how easy it is for new people to enter the market. Innovation in browsers has definitely gone up and as a user I feel like I'm winning from this with better websites and more powerful web apps.

How many new browsers do you see? Is that innovation in browsers? Browser competition and innovation is at its lowest ever. Chrome holds 2/3rds usage globally.

I don’t want more powerful ways to display ads, I want to get more content, better connected, without any of the fluff around it.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#55

Post by pvg »

kuschku wrote: post #45
pvg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML5 is amazing for existing browser vendors, developers, and in the short-term, users. But everyone else loses. Horribly. I don't understand who the 'everybody else' is in this case and what and when their horrible losing will be.

People trying to build new tools that parse the web. Try building a crawler without reusing an existing browser engine. Try running unit tests against your own web projects with Selenium without running a headless browser. Phantom.JS gave up because they couldn’t keep up with the complexity, and Chrome headless "just works". Opera gave up on their own browser engine because of the complexity of parsing HTML5 accurate…

That's a pretty tiny 'everybody else' compared to users, web and browser developers. They seem to be doing mostly ok and I still don't follow your argument that their concerns should somehow reign supreme over those of, you know, the actual everybody else.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#56

Post by tptacek »

lucideer wrote: post #48
ChrisSD wrote: post #17

Earlier 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…

To put a slightly different spin on the same story as perspective always colours the telling: W3C decided to deprecate HTML in favour of XHTML. Most of the web quickly moved to XHTML. One individual (an employee at Opera, then Mozilla, finally and currently Google) wrote an oddly influential opinion piece saying the the move to XHTML had been somehow harmful and pushed for the major browser vendors to form a rival no…

That seems to ignore the conventional wisdom that according-to-Hoyle XHTML was a DOA standard because it mandated error handling in ways that no browser implemented and most of the authoring community didn't want. Authors don't write well-formed XML, even today.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#57

Post by detaro »

kuschku wrote: post #45
pvg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML5 is amazing for existing browser vendors, developers, and in the short-term, users. But everyone else loses. Horribly. I don't understand who the 'everybody else' is in this case and what and when their horrible losing will be.

People trying to build new tools that parse the web. Try building a crawler without reusing an existing browser engine. Try running unit tests against your own web projects with Selenium without running a headless browser. Phantom.JS gave up because they couldn’t keep up with the complexity, and Chrome headless "just works". Opera gave up on their own browser engine because of the complexity of parsing HTML5 accurate…

I very much doubt Opera gave up because of "parsing HTML5". Parsing HTML5 is well-defined, certainly better than what was there before (unless you are willing to say "if you don't write perfect XML you don't get to be on the web", but good luck with that – no browser ever was and never will be in the position to do that)

The vast majority of the difficulty of the web platform is in the layers above, which don't care if the DOM they are looking at came from HTML5 or XHTML: layouting/rendering, interactions of JS and DOM, ...

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#58

Post by olavk »

kuschku wrote: post #23
Latty wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To offer another perspective. I'd say the W3C wasted a huge amount of time pursuing quests of purity (XHTML) over actually making the web better for users. I see the value in what they were trying to do, but it wasn't letting people do the things they wanted to do on the web. As browsers started just implementing features outside of standards in completely disparate ways because everyone was desperate for them (leadi…

> I'd say the W3C wasted a huge amount of time pursuing quests of purity (XHTML) over actually making the web better for users. I see the value in what they were trying to do, but it wasn't letting people do the things they wanted to do on the web. Okay, let’s make a deal: We both write a crawler that can fully reliably parse websites. I implement XHTML1.1, you implement HTML5. We both get 1 month time. What do you t…

The HTML5 crawler would be able to crawl the web, the XHTML crawler would be able to crawl 0.0001% of the web.

XHTML would only improve the web if all existing HTML went away or was changed to XHTML. Since this is never going to happen, XHTML does not simplify anything.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#59

Post by haberman »

smaddox wrote: post #29
cwmma wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're downplaying the shit show that was XHTML. It was the epitome of standards people chasing the ideal of a perfect platonic ideal of a standard at the cost of actual usability. E.G. a single parse error in an XHTML document and it doesn't render at all. That all by itself was a deal breaker for many people.

That seems reasonable to me. Would you want your programming language to compile code that has a syntax error?

Yes, it seems reasonable, and the analogy with programming languages seems to make sense. But there's a big difference. With programming languages, you write a program, and when it's correct, you check it in and it's immutable until you check in a new version. Web pages are composited on-the-fly by programs that combine static files, database content, content from third parties, etc. The only way you guarantee a valid output document is if your compositor is bug free and defensively validates any third-party content you might be pulling in. Any bug in the compositor and your website is totally unavailable for users that hit the bug.

This is a great illustration of the concept: https://web.archive.org/web/20060613193727/http://diveintoma...

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#60

Post by dooglius »

I'm not too knowledgeable on the background here, or on how the politics of standards organizations work, but my understanding is that the EU standards bodies (presumably as well as similar organizations for other governments) consider the W3C to be authoritative. Even if all the browsers prefer WHATWG's spec, won't they be forced to adopt W3C in the same way phones have to support USB charging[0]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply

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