5 ms·

What's up with the W3C hate here around? As far as I can see all they're trying to do is to publish a snapshot of WHATWG's work, which WHATWG refuses to do. Th

What's up with the W3C hate here around? As far as I can see all they're trying to do is to publish a snapshot of WHATWG's work, which WHATWG refuses to do. There are those of us who need to develop against a stable feature set. Browser developers aren't the only ones interested in HTML, it's one of the most used vocabulary/API of all times. Is it unreasonable to expect some results after more than 10 years of work. I think some WHATWG members make themselves a bad name by ridiculing W3C publicly; WHATWG do great work, why do they find it necessary to troll W3C? I have a feeling it is it because they think they "own" HTML or something. In that case, they should be reminded of the fact that neither WHATWG nor W3C are "standards bodies" vs. IETF and ISO/IEC, say.

Touche 10y ago
Probably because the W3C literally copy/pastes other's work and claims it for their own. Look at this blog post, which doesn't credit WHATWG at all for doing the actual work of speccing HTML.
- bootload 10y ago
  "Probably because the W3C literally copy/pastes other's work and claims it for their own. Look at this blog post, which doesn't credit WHATWG at all for doing the actual work of speccing HTML." Does WHATWG put a licence their work?
  - Touche 10y ago
    I don't know or care, I didn't claim that W3C is breaking a license, just that they are taking other people's work and claiming it as their own. That you can't see the difference between these things is not anything I can help you with.
    - bootload 10y ago
      "I didn't claim that W3C is breaking a license, just that they are taking other people's work and claiming it as their own." The only reason I ask? If there's a license you can force the W3C to display it. I can see what you're getting at, and if the W3C as an organisation is stupid enough to make claims on ideas from WHATWG they should be reminded and forced to acknowledge this through law. One way to do this is enforcement by license.
      - tannhaeuser 10y ago
        It's absurd to think that W3C is claiming WHATWG's work as their own. W3C specs are read by relatively few people who generally know about the text provenance and its relationship with WHATWG specs.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
Touche 10y ago
> There are those of us who need to develop against a stable feature set. Can you explain what you mean here more? The HTML standard doesn't break compatibility, if that's what you mean, because of course that's not possible. So I suspect you mean something else; can you explain?
- tannhaeuser 10y ago
  Sure. For example, WHATWG has recently removed scoped styles from HTML (don't know if this change made it into W3C's HTML 5.1), and probably for a good reason. Now you could say scoped styles were never in a published "standard", and rightly so; but that's kindof the problem, because WHATWG never publishes or commits to anything. Say you have contractual obligations to deliver HTML; had you used scoped styles, you're now in for some extra work to replace it with something else.
  - gsnedders 10y ago
    I can't remember off-hand, but scoped styles shouldn't have made it into 5.0's Recommendation (one of the requirements for CR to PR advancement is showing each feature has implementation experience), though if it did it wouldn't be the only one that made it through into HTML 5.0 despite the W3C process. As for the WHATWG, I don't believe that any feature without implementer support has landed in the WHATWG HTML spec in several years now, and I think there's a clear intention to keep it that way, so there shouldn't be featured that never get implemented in the spec.
    - tannhaeuser 10y ago
      This was just an example, please don't take it as criticism. The point, though, stands, and is illustrated by the fact that I can't even use a permalink to a version of the WHATWG HTML spec that still has scoped styles defined (at best, you can point to a ancient bikeshed or anolis commit). Which is why WHATWG HTML isn't a "standard".
gsnedders 10y ago
Because it's not just a snapshot—it has a growing diff to the WHATWG spec, and when they do copy over commits they sometimes do so incompletely. (An example of this is the HTML 5.1 definition of document.domain: if you try and set it to any host except for the current one it throws SecurityError; this came about as a result of bogusly applying patch from WHATWG spec.) As far as I'm aware, most of the annoyance of the W3C fork is the fact that there's good people spending a lot of time on it (instead of, e.g., working on specifying parts of the Web platform that every modern site relies on that are essentially undefined, like the CSSOM), and the fact that it isn't just a snapshot and that it therefore causes confusion with two different, at times contradictory documents.

Touche 10y ago

Probably because the W3C literally copy/pastes other's work and claims it for their own. Look at this blog post, which doesn't credit WHATWG at all for doing the actual work of speccing HTML.

bootload 10y ago
"Probably because the W3C literally copy/pastes other's work and claims it for their own. Look at this blog post, which doesn't credit WHATWG at all for doing the actual work of speccing HTML." Does WHATWG put a licence their work?
- Touche 10y ago
  I don't know or care, I didn't claim that W3C is breaking a license, just that they are taking other people's work and claiming it as their own. That you can't see the difference between these things is not anything I can help you with.
  - bootload 10y ago
    "I didn't claim that W3C is breaking a license, just that they are taking other people's work and claiming it as their own." The only reason I ask? If there's a license you can force the W3C to display it. I can see what you're getting at, and if the W3C as an organisation is stupid enough to make claims on ideas from WHATWG they should be reminded and forced to acknowledge this through law. One way to do this is enforcement by license.
    - tannhaeuser 10y ago
      It's absurd to think that W3C is claiming WHATWG's work as their own. W3C specs are read by relatively few people who generally know about the text provenance and its relationship with WHATWG specs.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

Touche 10y ago

> There are those of us who need to develop against a stable feature set. Can you explain what you mean here more? The HTML standard doesn't break compatibility, if that's what you mean, because of course that's not possible. So I suspect you mean something else; can you explain?

tannhaeuser 10y ago
Sure. For example, WHATWG has recently removed scoped styles from HTML (don't know if this change made it into W3C's HTML 5.1), and probably for a good reason. Now you could say scoped styles were never in a published "standard", and rightly so; but that's kindof the problem, because WHATWG never publishes or commits to anything. Say you have contractual obligations to deliver HTML; had you used scoped styles, you're now in for some extra work to replace it with something else.
- gsnedders 10y ago
  I can't remember off-hand, but scoped styles shouldn't have made it into 5.0's Recommendation (one of the requirements for CR to PR advancement is showing each feature has implementation experience), though if it did it wouldn't be the only one that made it through into HTML 5.0 despite the W3C process. As for the WHATWG, I don't believe that any feature without implementer support has landed in the WHATWG HTML spec in several years now, and I think there's a clear intention to keep it that way, so there shouldn't be featured that never get implemented in the spec.
  - tannhaeuser 10y ago
    This was just an example, please don't take it as criticism. The point, though, stands, and is illustrated by the fact that I can't even use a permalink to a version of the WHATWG HTML spec that still has scoped styles defined (at best, you can point to a ancient bikeshed or anolis commit). Which is why WHATWG HTML isn't a "standard".

gsnedders 10y ago

Because it's not just a snapshot—it has a growing diff to the WHATWG spec, and when they do copy over commits they sometimes do so incompletely. (An example of this is the HTML 5.1 definition of document.domain: if you try and set it to any host except for the current one it throws SecurityError; this came about as a result of bogusly applying patch from WHATWG spec.) As far as I'm aware, most of the annoyance of the W3C fork is the fact that there's good people spending a lot of time on it (instead of, e.g., working on specifying parts of the Web platform that every modern site relies on that are essentially undefined, like the CSSOM), and the fact that it isn't just a snapshot and that it therefore causes confusion with two different, at times contradictory documents.