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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

#91

Post by danarmak »

klez wrote: post #30
danarmak wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But no browser maker recognizes the W3C standard or claims to implement it, so what good is it?

That no browser maker recognizes W3C's standard is a bit misleading. MDN (i.e. Mozilla) quotes the w3c recommendations all over the place. Google, from what I found around, cites nothing, not even WHATWG. Webkit cites MDN (which cites w3c) as a source.

If I complain to Mozilla that they deviate from the W3C spec in some respect, will they treat that as a bug, or will they more likely say "no-one implements this, so no website uses this, so we have no reason to be the first to implement this because we don't think this is part of the spec is really important"?

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

#92

Post by officialchicken »

austincheney wrote: post #79
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…

> 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…

While jaded, I don't think your reasoning is valid. If the question is, "Why suspect an organization to coordinate with another to establish a dominant position in manufacturing or standardization in order to create a barrier to entry/monopoly for potential competitors?" I'm pretty sure the answer has nothing to do with web developers, even if that's the subject at hand in the context of this question.

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

#93

Post by bmn__ »

cotelletta wrote: post #26
Multicomp wrote: post #4

Extremely condensed version: W3C is giving up publishing future HTML and DOM standards. They will focus on writing 'recommendations' for the WHATWG's living standards. Versioned vs living HTML discussions aside, I personally admit some mild sadness that the original group responsible for maintaining Sir TBL's work on HTML has been forced to give up.

These are the same people who created XHTML, an ivory tower idea nobody was waiting for... who didn't support the most popular layout method at the time, tables, in their new styling language CSS. W3C became irrelevant because they kept thinking they could just tell the entire web what to do, that they'd make enormous technical investments to satisfy the W3C's latest fashions. I interacted with them once, over their…

> who didn't support the most popular layout method at the time, tables, in their new styling language CSS.

That's quite a misunderstanding of the past. Your proposition is only technically correct: CSS1 (Dec 1996) did not have table display properties, but they were added in CSS2 (Mar 1998). They were available early enough to matter.

The reason why many Web authors did not design with these properties is not the fault of the W3C, but rather because of the typical Microsoft sabotage. In the early 2000s, I personally did not give a shit about IE - my standard compliant CSS rendered fine in other popular browsers.

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

#95

Post by rangerpolitic »

cotelletta wrote: post #34
zmix wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who didn't support the most popular layout method at the time, tables I can do tables just fine in XHTML. And luckily, tables have become redundant as layout technique, since CSS would do that, already then. The nice thing with X(HT)ML is, that you can place queries against any document, natively.

Did you miss the 5-10 years during which every CSS designer tortured themselves replicating tables with floats? Google 'pure css page footer' to see the wreckage. CSS tables took years to be supported, and even then, only brought back what people had been irrationally told to stay away from. It took another 5 years for flex box to become usable, adding something actually new. To this day, changing a site's entire des…

> Did you miss the 5-10 years during which every CSS designer tortured themselves replicating tables with floats?

I never really understood why people had such difficulty with this. I was able to execute table-less layouts while still supporting IE5 on Mac.

> To this day, changing a site's entire design without touching its markup is a mirage.

That's only because HTML authoring is dead. No one writes HTML well these days. Just look at tools like Elementor. How many nested divs do you need to add a faux button to a website? It's ridiculous.

Write well-structured, semantic HTML being mindful of a separation of concerns, and flipping between stylesheets is a piece of cake.

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

#96

Post by tannhaeuser »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #67
klez wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are the same people who created XHTML, an ivory tower idea nobody was waiting for I never understood what people had against XHTML. The more common theme seems to be "XML... eww" and nothing else. Can anybody help me understand?

Agreed, I was all-in on XHTML, I'm still smarting that HTML5 won with the seeming death of the semantic web. We did get a handful of different names for a div though, so that's nice, maybe.

I don't see this connection of XHTML and semweb. The preamble to the original XML spec reads as follows:

> The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML that is completely described in this document. Its goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML.

Basically, XML's purpose was to make parsing rules for web documents generic and DTD-less, in particular to support new vocabularies (eg. SVG and MathML) in addition to HTML/XHTML. The XML namespace spec back then was another pillar for advancing that goal.

HTML5 then simply imported SVG and MathML into HTML as external vocabulary, without a need for namespaces or other modularization meta-technique.

That XML has failed on the web (and was succesful only in enterprise and publishing) shouldn't make fans of structured documents on the web bitter, though: SGML is exactly as capable as XML to describe the syntax of markup documents (with tag inference, a feature recently being discussed for re-inclusion into XML under the term invisible markup), and even can parse markdown and other Wiki syntaxes, can do HTML-aware, injection-free macro expansion, and a whole lot of other things waiting to be discovered by XML fans.

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

#97

Post by cygx »

ChrisSD wrote: post #73
maeln wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes tables. There is a reason why people where abusing table for layout even though all hated it. In the end, we finally have CSS grid now ( https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid ) which do what we were trying to achieve back in the day with tables. We had to wait until 2016 to have a type of layout which is considered standard in most GUI toolkit ...

`display: table` has been around since around 2001/02, for exactly that reason. However IE didn't support it until IE8.

However IE didn't support it until IE8.

Which got released in 2009, but took another year to overtake IE6+7 in market share. This means `display:table` was of limited usefulness for nearly a decade after its introduction...

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

#98

Post by ChrisSD »

jcranmer wrote: post #85
klez wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are the same people who created XHTML, an ivory tower idea nobody was waiting for I never understood what people had against XHTML. The more common theme seems to be "XML... eww" and nothing else. Can anybody help me understand?

This isn't against XHTML 1.1, which was HTML 4.01 shoved into a container of "if it isn't valid XML, display an error page instead;" rather, a lot of the hate is against XHTML 2.0, which decided to rip out HTML features such as forms, frames, most of the old elements such as or , and generally screw compatibility completely. For a reaction from a browser developer, see https://dbaron.org/log/20090707-ex-html

Ooph yes. I had forgotten how they were rewriting HTML essentially from scratch and this time basing it on XML. In fairness, it wasn't a completely dumb idea as HTML had picked up a lot of warts from its long history and anyway almost no browser implemented the HTML spec as written. The browser wars especially spread a lot of debris across implementations. The temptation to rip it up and start again is very strong with software engineers even in the best of circumstances (heck, just ask Google about this).

But getting everyone else to start over as well was always going to be an uphill struggle even if it was truly the best thing ever.

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

#99

Post by inlined »

austincheney wrote: post #79
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…

> 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…

And yet, I can build world scale cloud systems but can’t build a web front end anymore to save my life.

I’m blown away by the sheer complexity that has evolved in frontend code. Developers there have such a broad toolset and arcane knowledge about how you really need to combine two CSS traits on surrounding containers to get the positioning you want.

Unfortunately, in our industry, most engineers think the layer above theirs is a trivial composition of parts

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

#100

Post by _bxg1 »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #65
stupidcar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Standard" = consensus definition of desired behaviour. "Living" = open to change. I don't see what is so oxymoronic about this? Just because a consensus has been reached doesn't mean that consensus must be immutable. Just because the process of standardisation in some technical domains has tended to use versioned documents doesn't mean that such an approach is fundamental to standardisation.

The point is that HTML is almost 30 years old, and based on SGML which is much older (even though ISO 8879 is officially "only" from 1986), where SGML is just a formalization of typesetting practices established in the 1960's and 1970's. Given the depth of usage of HTML in everyday life (laws, contracts in ecommerce, medical records, personal communication, education, etc., etc.), I think HTML deserves better than be…

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 (which is good, because it was barely a real programming language at the beginning). But HTML itself is not dramatically different; most of what it's gotten are a handful of native replacements for things people had been implementing in JavaScript on a regular basis.

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