8 ms·

https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/changes.html#changes https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/changes.html#changes

by taspeotis 9y ago

igravious 9y ago
Their TOC needs to be collapsible and selectively expandable. UX fail imho.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- vog 9y ago
  > Their TOC needs to be collapsible Not sure what you mean. In the lower left there is a working collapse button.
  - igravious 9y ago
    No, not the entire sidebar, the individual branch elements of the tree I mean. Like this: http://jsfiddle.net/tygrj1us/ http://jsfiddle.net/tygrj1us/
planxty 9y ago
Thanks! All I want for Christmas is an obvious link in the top of every W3C document showing me what's new.
rwmj 9y ago
For those who have not been paying attention for a decade, what's the relationship between this revision and WHATWG?
- igravious 9y ago
  In the interests of completeness. “HTML Living Standard — Last Updated 13 December 2017” https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ I've been telling students that the W3C develops and maintains the HTML spec. Looks like I'm dead wrong. Oops.
  - andrewmcwatters 9y ago
    Well, they used to.
- vog 9y ago
  I hope this doesn't sound too snarky, but as far as I know, the WHATWG standard is live, consistent and always up to date (including corrections), while the W3C recommendations are outdated snapshots of the WHATWG standard, which are labeled by arbitrary version numbers instead of the snapshot timestamp, for whatever reason. EDIT: Apparently even that description was too charitable towards the W3C (see gsnedders comments).
  - gsnedders 9y ago
    They stopped really doing snapshots of the WHATWG standard a while ago when they moved their authoring toolchain away from what the WHATWG document uses, and now just occasionally selectively copy over patches (sometimes incompletely) and make their own changes.
    - vog 9y ago
      Thanks for the update! But is that actually an improvement over the previous situation? (Serious question.)
      - gsnedders 9y ago
        > But is that actually an improvement over the previous situation? (Serious question.) No, it means we have two increasingly different documents purportedly defining the same things, and when they do copy patches over they've failed to also copy over other dependent patches too on a number of occasions leaving their spec as defined unimplementable.
        exikyut 9y ago
        I know the current manglement isn't explicitly malicious, but this is an atrocious state of affairs. Practically speaking, the Web is a consortium of corporate foghorns that also happen to collectively be the majority ad-hoc directors of new media (translation: agendas with finance). Cable and daytime TV was the old media, which of course still exists, and social media has become a juggernaut majority of its own beside that. So, you'd think the actual grassroots on-the-ground parts of a project that is ostensibly defined to be open and free, would actually be made of extremely smart people with straightforward management and as little bureaucracy as possible. Because, you know, the part where everything hits the ground needs to be well-oiled, have no chinks in the armor, and provide a secure foundation of independence. And yet we have... chaos, infighting, politics and wars over (literally) nothing. And while all that's happening, corporations are progressively nibbling away at the capabilities we have today (to set up websites, to communicate freely) that we take for granted. One day we'll wake up checkmated by some incredibly well-engineered chess move... Sighs If the net neutrality thing is repealed, I will be exactly 0% surprised. It'll just be another EME, really.
- ChrisSD 9y ago
  The WHATWG is for browser vendors. It's in a constant state of flux as new changes get proposed and those proposals get changed through implementation. The W3C is for web authors. It presents a more stable recommendation and provides advice (based on research) for authors.
  - vog 9y ago
    I tend to disagree with both points. > The W3C is for web authors. It presents a more stable recommendation and provides advice (based on research) for authors. Web authors usually use MDN instead, because it serves that purpose in a much better way. (Note that despite the name MDN is not Mozilla specific but a cross-browser resource, and that Microsoft and Google recently joined MDN.) > The WHATWG is for browser vendors. It's in a constant state of flux as new changes get proposed and those proposals get changed through implementation. The W3C recommendation is no different in that regard, they also describe stuff that's not fully implemented in all browsers yet. But the WHATWG version is more up to date, so you'll notice much earlier that the new feature you want to depend on will be abandoned or changed.
    - gsnedders 9y ago
      > The W3C recommendation is no different in that regard, they also describe stuff that's not fully implemented in all browsers yet. Note for a W3C document to go to Recommendation there must be two interoperable implementations. Of course, that doesn't mean any browser has implemented any of it, just that someone has implemented each part of it.
- dmitriid 9y ago
  Full story here: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/5swe9b/what_is_the_difference_between_the_w3c_and_the/ddkwft4/ https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/5swe9b/what_is_... tl;dr: Ignore w3c's HTML "standards" as they are (often poor) copies of WHATWG's standards.
  - jcrben 9y ago
    Domenic Denicola posted similar thoughts on Stackoverflow as well: https://stackoverflow.com/a/43082734/4200039 https://stackoverflow.com/a/43082734/4200039
    - dmitriid 9y ago
      Yeah, that's him both on SO and Reddit :)
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    > WHATWG's standards I my opinion one cannot call something a "standard" that changes every few days. EDIT: In this sense W3C's HTML 5.x can be considered a rather badly authored (cf. other comments here) standard, while what the WHATWG releases is not something that even measures up to a standard, but it is the daily version of how HTML is supposed to be today.
    - andrewmcwatters 9y ago
      Exactly. How the hell is someone supposed to built against their work? You can't, it would just be piecemealed.
      - Touche 9y ago
        Just because something changes often doesn't mean it is unstable. Do you ever shop at amazon.com? I do, and I find it pretty stable. Just because it changes often doesn't mean things are sloppily accepted, or that experimental ideas are added and later removed. Indeed, if you want to build something for the web, reading an outdated document that contains bugs browsers have already fixed is not a good idea.
- stupidcar 9y ago
  The W3C version is a sporadically updated, bad-faith fork of the WHATWG version, created to maintain the fiction that it "owns" HTML, which it deems necessary to maintain the organisation's standing (and funding) in the eyes of other organisations and governments.
  - collinmanderson 9y ago
    I think of it like WHATWG is the git master branch of the "html" standard, and W3C regularly packages a modified (changing things they disagree with) version of it and "release" it with a version number (HTML 5.x), going through alpha, beta, etc. By the time it's finalized, it's out of date.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - xg15 9y ago
    And yet, we don't get things like that changes page from the WHATWG version. (Unless you want to dig through the whole commit history) It's absolutely a fiction, but at the same time, this at least attempts to be a standard. The WHATWG version seems more like a reflection of "oh by the way that's the rules our browsers are following this month. Your's truly, the browser vendors."
    - domenicd 9y ago
      > And yet, we don't get things like that changes page from the WHATWG version. (Unless you want to dig through the whole commit history) So far we've done our best to keep a really readable, tidy Git commit log, which should help with understanding changes: https://github.com/whatwg/html/commits/master https://github.com/whatwg/html/commits/master If you omit the "Editorial:" or "Meta:" commits, I think it's actually at a similar level of detail as the W3C fork's changes log. (Not completely; scrolling through I do see a number of commits that wouldn't be relevant.) But the W3C fork has only managed to copy-and-paste a small subset of our changes, so indeed, the changes log for the last year of work at the WHATWG will be somewhat daunting compared to the small subset they managed to copy over. There may be room for someone to compile a higher-level "this week/month/year in the HTML Standard" or similar; before I started working in the WHATWG, that actually used to exist: https://blog.whatwg.org/category/weekly-review https://blog.whatwg.org/category/weekly-review (also in very amusing YouTube form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Bg5BPnmj68 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Bg5BPnmj68). So far we haven't had the bandwidth to restart that, but if you or someone else wants to contribute that sort of thing to the blog or elsewhere, I'd love to help you get started.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  WHATWG is for fashion victims always eager to try out what might work in a very specific version of a single browser. W3C is supposed to be properly supported everywhere.
- austincheney 9y ago
  The WHATWG specs contain a lot of innovation, but change more rapidly. In many cases WHATWG specs are living documents that gradually evolve and adapt to changes in real time. Conversely the W3C specifications are fixed to versions and are occasionally patched with updates. The W3C process is incredibly slow and conservative, which frustrates developers on the bleeding edge. Due to the slow process, thoroughness of that process, and formal versioning most software vendors prefer to implement against the W3C publications as more stable or reliable.

https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/changes.html#changes https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/changes.html#changes

igravious 9y ago

Their TOC needs to be collapsible and selectively expandable. UX fail imho.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
vog 9y ago
> Their TOC needs to be collapsible Not sure what you mean. In the lower left there is a working collapse button.
- igravious 9y ago
  No, not the entire sidebar, the individual branch elements of the tree I mean. Like this: http://jsfiddle.net/tygrj1us/ http://jsfiddle.net/tygrj1us/

planxty 9y ago

Thanks! All I want for Christmas is an obvious link in the top of every W3C document showing me what's new.

rwmj 9y ago

For those who have not been paying attention for a decade, what's the relationship between this revision and WHATWG?

igravious 9y ago
In the interests of completeness. “HTML Living Standard — Last Updated 13 December 2017” https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ I've been telling students that the W3C develops and maintains the HTML spec. Looks like I'm dead wrong. Oops.
- andrewmcwatters 9y ago
  Well, they used to.
vog 9y ago
I hope this doesn't sound too snarky, but as far as I know, the WHATWG standard is live, consistent and always up to date (including corrections), while the W3C recommendations are outdated snapshots of the WHATWG standard, which are labeled by arbitrary version numbers instead of the snapshot timestamp, for whatever reason. EDIT: Apparently even that description was too charitable towards the W3C (see gsnedders comments).
- gsnedders 9y ago
  They stopped really doing snapshots of the WHATWG standard a while ago when they moved their authoring toolchain away from what the WHATWG document uses, and now just occasionally selectively copy over patches (sometimes incompletely) and make their own changes.
  - vog 9y ago
    Thanks for the update! But is that actually an improvement over the previous situation? (Serious question.)
    - gsnedders 9y ago
      > But is that actually an improvement over the previous situation? (Serious question.) No, it means we have two increasingly different documents purportedly defining the same things, and when they do copy patches over they've failed to also copy over other dependent patches too on a number of occasions leaving their spec as defined unimplementable.
      - exikyut 9y ago
        I know the current manglement isn't explicitly malicious, but this is an atrocious state of affairs. Practically speaking, the Web is a consortium of corporate foghorns that also happen to collectively be the majority ad-hoc directors of new media (translation: agendas with finance). Cable and daytime TV was the old media, which of course still exists, and social media has become a juggernaut majority of its own beside that. So, you'd think the actual grassroots on-the-ground parts of a project that is ostensibly defined to be open and free, would actually be made of extremely smart people with straightforward management and as little bureaucracy as possible. Because, you know, the part where everything hits the ground needs to be well-oiled, have no chinks in the armor, and provide a secure foundation of independence. And yet we have... chaos, infighting, politics and wars over (literally) nothing. And while all that's happening, corporations are progressively nibbling away at the capabilities we have today (to set up websites, to communicate freely) that we take for granted. One day we'll wake up checkmated by some incredibly well-engineered chess move... Sighs If the net neutrality thing is repealed, I will be exactly 0% surprised. It'll just be another EME, really.
ChrisSD 9y ago
The WHATWG is for browser vendors. It's in a constant state of flux as new changes get proposed and those proposals get changed through implementation. The W3C is for web authors. It presents a more stable recommendation and provides advice (based on research) for authors.
- vog 9y ago
  I tend to disagree with both points. > The W3C is for web authors. It presents a more stable recommendation and provides advice (based on research) for authors. Web authors usually use MDN instead, because it serves that purpose in a much better way. (Note that despite the name MDN is not Mozilla specific but a cross-browser resource, and that Microsoft and Google recently joined MDN.) > The WHATWG is for browser vendors. It's in a constant state of flux as new changes get proposed and those proposals get changed through implementation. The W3C recommendation is no different in that regard, they also describe stuff that's not fully implemented in all browsers yet. But the WHATWG version is more up to date, so you'll notice much earlier that the new feature you want to depend on will be abandoned or changed.
  - gsnedders 9y ago
    > The W3C recommendation is no different in that regard, they also describe stuff that's not fully implemented in all browsers yet. Note for a W3C document to go to Recommendation there must be two interoperable implementations. Of course, that doesn't mean any browser has implemented any of it, just that someone has implemented each part of it.
dmitriid 9y ago
Full story here: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/5swe9b/what_is_the_difference_between_the_w3c_and_the/ddkwft4/ https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/5swe9b/what_is_... tl;dr: Ignore w3c's HTML "standards" as they are (often poor) copies of WHATWG's standards.
- jcrben 9y ago
  Domenic Denicola posted similar thoughts on Stackoverflow as well: https://stackoverflow.com/a/43082734/4200039 https://stackoverflow.com/a/43082734/4200039
  - dmitriid 9y ago
    Yeah, that's him both on SO and Reddit :)
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > WHATWG's standards I my opinion one cannot call something a "standard" that changes every few days. EDIT: In this sense W3C's HTML 5.x can be considered a rather badly authored (cf. other comments here) standard, while what the WHATWG releases is not something that even measures up to a standard, but it is the daily version of how HTML is supposed to be today.
  - andrewmcwatters 9y ago
    Exactly. How the hell is someone supposed to built against their work? You can't, it would just be piecemealed.
    - Touche 9y ago
      Just because something changes often doesn't mean it is unstable. Do you ever shop at amazon.com? I do, and I find it pretty stable. Just because it changes often doesn't mean things are sloppily accepted, or that experimental ideas are added and later removed. Indeed, if you want to build something for the web, reading an outdated document that contains bugs browsers have already fixed is not a good idea.
stupidcar 9y ago
The W3C version is a sporadically updated, bad-faith fork of the WHATWG version, created to maintain the fiction that it "owns" HTML, which it deems necessary to maintain the organisation's standing (and funding) in the eyes of other organisations and governments.
- collinmanderson 9y ago
  I think of it like WHATWG is the git master branch of the "html" standard, and W3C regularly packages a modified (changing things they disagree with) version of it and "release" it with a version number (HTML 5.x), going through alpha, beta, etc. By the time it's finalized, it's out of date.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- xg15 9y ago
  And yet, we don't get things like that changes page from the WHATWG version. (Unless you want to dig through the whole commit history) It's absolutely a fiction, but at the same time, this at least attempts to be a standard. The WHATWG version seems more like a reflection of "oh by the way that's the rules our browsers are following this month. Your's truly, the browser vendors."
  - domenicd 9y ago
    > And yet, we don't get things like that changes page from the WHATWG version. (Unless you want to dig through the whole commit history) So far we've done our best to keep a really readable, tidy Git commit log, which should help with understanding changes: https://github.com/whatwg/html/commits/master https://github.com/whatwg/html/commits/master If you omit the "Editorial:" or "Meta:" commits, I think it's actually at a similar level of detail as the W3C fork's changes log. (Not completely; scrolling through I do see a number of commits that wouldn't be relevant.) But the W3C fork has only managed to copy-and-paste a small subset of our changes, so indeed, the changes log for the last year of work at the WHATWG will be somewhat daunting compared to the small subset they managed to copy over. There may be room for someone to compile a higher-level "this week/month/year in the HTML Standard" or similar; before I started working in the WHATWG, that actually used to exist: https://blog.whatwg.org/category/weekly-review https://blog.whatwg.org/category/weekly-review (also in very amusing YouTube form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Bg5BPnmj68 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Bg5BPnmj68). So far we haven't had the bandwidth to restart that, but if you or someone else wants to contribute that sort of thing to the blog or elsewhere, I'd love to help you get started.
pjmlp 9y ago
WHATWG is for fashion victims always eager to try out what might work in a very specific version of a single browser. W3C is supposed to be properly supported everywhere.
austincheney 9y ago
The WHATWG specs contain a lot of innovation, but change more rapidly. In many cases WHATWG specs are living documents that gradually evolve and adapt to changes in real time. Conversely the W3C specifications are fixed to versions and are occasionally patched with updates. The W3C process is incredibly slow and conservative, which frustrates developers on the bleeding edge. Due to the slow process, thoroughness of that process, and formal versioning most software vendors prefer to implement against the W3C publications as more stable or reliable.