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W3C declares HTML5 standard complete

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Re: W3C declares HTML5 standard complete

#51

Post by [deleted] »

pjmlp wrote: post #22
nostrademons wrote: post #3

The other huge accomplishment of HTML5 is completely standardizing many fundamental parts of the web that previously were a mess of browser incompatibilities. 6 years ago, if you wanted to parse HTML, you might reach for BeautifulSoup, or libxml, or Hpricot, or Nokogiri...and they would all be subtly different in the parse tree they produced. And they couldn't do any better, because if you viewed the page in IE, or F…

> Now, IE9+, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are all basically guaranteed to look at the same page in the same way, and the "toolsmith" parsers like Gumbo or html5lib are all rapidly converging on the standard. So it's finally possible to see a page the way a browser sees it. The web projects I have to take part on, are a distant reality from that description.

[deleted]

Re: W3C declares HTML5 standard complete

#52

Post by obviouslygreen »

nostrademons wrote: post #40
ufo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about inconsistent HTML parsing or inconsistent CSS rendering? The latter is much more of a pita than the former.

If you stick to the basics of CSS that have been around for a decade or so, both of them are basically solved problems. Browsers are remarkably uniform in how they handle the stuff that was a PITA in 2008. The problem is that expectations adjust too, and now we want all these new HTML5 features that were just pioneered in a single browser a couple years ago. Those have a lot of cross-browser issues.

In many environments, expectations don't have to adjust. With corporate clients, expectations were never reasonable in the first place, and many common requirements that have been around for decades still aren't reasonable.

Clients often demand idiocy like "pixel perfection," specific fonts, custom scaling behavior for size (including application-controlled zooming), and other things that simply aren't part of the paradigm for accessing websites through web browsers.

Between that and the fact that going "beyond the basics of CSS" is a pretty common thing, browser interfailure is still a real problem. It's not as bad as it used to be, but the problem is still there, and many of us are still dealing with it regularly.

Re: W3C declares HTML5 standard complete

#53

Post by cwyers »

johansch wrote: post #42

http://www.cnet.com/au/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups-sti... ""The real problem is of course that the W3C is still copying our work even after we asked them to stop doing that," [Anne] van Kesteren said. It's legal, but "oftentimes it comes pretty close [to] or is actual plagiarism." It's one of many instances of copying, Hickson said. "For reasons that defy my understanding, the W3C staff refuse to treat the WHAT…

It's amusing to me to watch the WHATWG people complain about the W3C having the temerity to put out revisions to their own specification, and then complaining about how the W3C is copying their work. Would they rather W3C put out an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT HTML specification from theirs? Would that be better for anyone at all?

Re: W3C declares HTML5 standard complete

#54

Post by vsync »

yuhong wrote: post #7
lucideer wrote: post #4

The term "WHATWG" seems to be conspicuously absent from this article. I wonder where they factor into this announcement.

I think they already moved to living standard.

Which means no standard at all.

I'm grateful to W3C for continuing their standardization work.

Re: W3C declares HTML5 standard complete

#55

Post by kijin »

cwyers wrote: post #53
johansch wrote: post #42

http://www.cnet.com/au/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups-sti... ""The real problem is of course that the W3C is still copying our work even after we asked them to stop doing that," [Anne] van Kesteren said. It's legal, but "oftentimes it comes pretty close [to] or is actual plagiarism." It's one of many instances of copying, Hickson said. "For reasons that defy my understanding, the W3C staff refuse to treat the WHAT…

It's amusing to me to watch the WHATWG people complain about the W3C having the temerity to put out revisions to their own specification, and then complaining about how the W3C is copying their work. Would they rather W3C put out an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT HTML specification from theirs? Would that be better for anyone at all?

I dunno, perhaps if the W3C and WHATWG produced radically different specifications, one of them would be explicitly rejected by everyone and thus die a clean death. That might be better than having two very similar, equally authoritative, but subtly different specifications, one of which is sort of but not quite a snapshot of the other.

Re: W3C declares HTML5 standard complete

#56

Post by Bahamut »

recursive wrote: post #6
kyriakos wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

latest versions of IE are pretty good regarding standards.

I wonder when they will get as good as the rest of the browsers that are out. I still find more bugs in IE11 than any other current browser.

I see more Safari bugs/issues - it's surprising how poor Safari is in some areas.

Re: W3C declares HTML5 standard complete

#57

Post by kibibu »

rimantas wrote: post #24
jaredmcateer wrote: post #8

Does anyone know how is Doctype versioning going to work with W3Cs snapshoting of the living standard? Or are browsers just going to ignore W3C and stick to implementing WHATWGs spec?

No browser ever paid any attention to the version of the HTML specified. The only use for DOCTYPE—and the reason it remains in HTML5—is "doctype switching", i.e. different rendering modes are triggered in the browsers. You can use "html", "html5", "html6.2" or "foobarbaz" as your doctype, the effect will be the same—they will all trigger standards compliant mode.

I have vague memories of Frames not working under the HTML4 Strict doctype

Re: W3C declares HTML5 standard complete

#58

Post by greyfade »

kijin wrote: post #55
cwyers wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing to me to watch the WHATWG people complain about the W3C having the temerity to put out revisions to their own specification, and then complaining about how the W3C is copying their work. Would they rather W3C put out an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT HTML specification from theirs? Would that be better for anyone at all?

I dunno, perhaps if the W3C and WHATWG produced radically different specifications, one of them would be explicitly rejected by everyone and thus die a clean death. That might be better than having two very similar, equally authoritative, but subtly different specifications, one of which is sort of but not quite a snapshot of the other.

Equally authoritative? I had no idea WHATWG was drafting specifications, let alone considered authoritative.

Re: W3C declares HTML5 standard complete

#59

Post by domenicd »

cwyers wrote: post #53
johansch wrote: post #42

http://www.cnet.com/au/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups-sti... ""The real problem is of course that the W3C is still copying our work even after we asked them to stop doing that," [Anne] van Kesteren said. It's legal, but "oftentimes it comes pretty close [to] or is actual plagiarism." It's one of many instances of copying, Hickson said. "For reasons that defy my understanding, the W3C staff refuse to treat the WHAT…

It's amusing to me to watch the WHATWG people complain about the W3C having the temerity to put out revisions to their own specification, and then complaining about how the W3C is copying their work. Would they rather W3C put out an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT HTML specification from theirs? Would that be better for anyone at all?

Yes, actually. We'd encourage the HTML working group to do original work. Many W3C working groups do that, e.g. the webapps working group worked on web components and various other specs, and it helps the web platform.

Re: W3C declares HTML5 standard complete

#60

Post by domenicd »

greyfade wrote: post #58
kijin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, perhaps if the W3C and WHATWG produced radically different specifications, one of them would be explicitly rejected by everyone and thus die a clean death. That might be better than having two very similar, equally authoritative, but subtly different specifications, one of which is sort of but not quite a snapshot of the other.

Equally authoritative? I had no idea WHATWG was drafting specifications, let alone considered authoritative.

Many of the foundational specifications of the web are authored and maintained by the WHATWG these days: https://spec.whatwg.org/

- DOM, HTML: obvious

- URL, Encoding, Fetch: foundational building blocks

- XHR, Fullscreen, Notifications: important features

There are also other up-and-coming specs like Books, Figures, Streams, or Loader (the latter two not listed).

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