7 ms·

Don't be fooled. The W3C does not even set the standard for HTML5 - it's developed by WHATWG and then periodically the W3C just makes a copy and throws away all

Don't be fooled. The W3C does not even set the standard for HTML5 - it's developed by WHATWG and then periodically the W3C just makes a copy and throws away all the GIT history and erases the acknowledgments section and publishes it to keep themselves feeling relevant. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6825713/html5-w3c-vs-whatwg-which-gives-the-most-authoritative-spec https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6825713/html5-w3c-vs-wha...

andy_ppp 9y ago
Oh man, how is this possibly legal? Can the WHATWG license their work in such a way as to disallow this, if you want a fixed version number to test against (which doesn’t actually make sense, as there is no reference implementation, just various browser vendors that hopefully converge on and agreed implementation) you can just fork your own version of the WHATWG html spec, which will be more inline with browsers and have further bug fixes and corrections.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  WHATWG doesn't care about this because honestly its an organization where the browser vendors can tell you what they will implement. Having W3C do this doesn't influence any of the decisions that they make.
- h1d 9y ago
  Why? WHATWG doesn't make money with the spec itself, rather want it spread to wider audience, so more are informed of the upcoming changes for smoother deployment.
  - naasking 9y ago
    Because that's just how copyright works. You can't erase attributions and redistribute without permission.
- gsnedders 9y ago
  Liberal spec licensing was a deliberate goal of the WHATWG: remember that most of the WHATWG specs have been written from scratch rather than derivatives of the existing W3C specs (which W3C host organisations hold the copyright of). It ultimately gives a further constraint on relevance: be relevant, or someone will fork your spec and implementers will follow.
- om2 9y ago
  WHATWG Living Standards are now licensed under CC-BY 4.0,so if the W3C continues to copy, it needs to provid appropriate acknowledgement. The lic mes does allow copying by design though.
goblin89 9y ago
Not going into politics I personally favor WHATWG’s overall presentation of the spec, but I go to W3C’s rendition for one reason—they version the spec and publish a readable changelog[0] highlighting the key changes between versions. In contrast, WHATWG’s officially recommended[1] ways of keeping up are commit history (quite messy), Twitter feed (primarily channeling commit history as it seems), and—I kid you not—manual diffing of Git revisions. [0] https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-html52-20171214/changes.html#changes https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-html52-20171214/changes.html#... [1] https://github.com/whatwg/html/blob/f8f9c6c222ce79c2f8df185521aaa291c7301419/FAQ.md#how-can-i-keep-track-of-changes-to-the-standard https://github.com/whatwg/html/blob/f8f9c6c222ce79c2f8df1855...
- duskwuff 9y ago
  The problem with the W3C version is that it isn't even a snapshot of any version of the WHATWG document. The W3C has modified it in some arbitrary ways which don't correspond to any "ground truth" in browser implementations. A practical example: The W3C "spec" says that the <main> tag must only appear once in a document. WHATWG and browsers agree that multiple <main> tags are perfectly fine, albeit silly.
  - goblin89 9y ago
    I don’t read the rest of W3C’s spec to be honest. It’s useful to have a brief summary of changes to see where things are heading (and any convenient changelog implies some kind of versioning), but I’d likely be checking MDN or WHATWG for specifics if something catches my eye. For example, after I saw the new <dialog> tag in W3C’s changelog, I jumped to MDN to find a friendly overview of its usage and a compatibility table (spoiler, the tag isn’t supported by most major browsers).
  - ChrisSD 9y ago
    But in practice that isn't a good example. Given HTML's extreme error tolerance the practical difference is zero. It only makes a difference for authors, who really should consider it an error to use more than one <main> tag.
ChrisSD 9y ago
WHATWG doesn't make a standard for HTML either. It hosts an ongoing conversation between browser vendors. Someone creating a standard from that conversation is useful, although I do agree w3c's approach isn't ideal. Personally I'd suggest HTML5 "levels" where level 1 would be fixed in stone (until HTML6) and higher levels are considered increasingly unstable.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  These days it feels like Google is the one writing the "standard" simply by throwing stuff into Blink that alternative engines ignore at their peril.
  - Bahamut 9y ago
    Google doesn’t quite have that power - some of the things they have pushed have failed to gain traction, sometimes for very good reasons. For example, Object.observe was a proposal that Google themselves eventually unshipped from the Chrome after the JS ecosystem roundly rejected adopting the paradigms it enables, most notably for React’s unidirectional data flow (it always felt like a proposal meant specifically to optimize Angular). Google also backtracked on Web Components, choosing to revise the spec after some ideas became awkward when combined with the emergence of ES modules. The other browser vendors play an incredibly meaningful role, as well as the frontend web developer community at large.
- realusername 9y ago
  They already tried that in CSS with browser vendor prefixes (-moz, -webkit, ...) but unfortunately temporary features tend to be used forever so it did not work well.
  - sitkack 9y ago
    Browsers need to have maps from vendor prefixes to standardized way of doing things. If an upgrade path isn't possible, the page needs to throw a warning back to the originating server in a GET request at a well known endpoint.
tannhaeuser 9y ago
It comes down to what you as web author want to accept as "standard". Just that Google, err "browser vendors", write spec texts that are changing all the time for over ten years now doesn't mean it's accepted by authors or the general public. If anything, the W3C has been handed down HTML spec work back in 1996 or so by IETF, when before HTML was spec'd in the form of RFCs with a proper DTD grammar for it's vocabulary. Anyway, I don't quite get the W3C hate, and the naive belief in WHATWG as the altruistic HTML authority when the motives and process for WHATWG are intransparent, and the Web has clearly degressed into a monopoly during WHATWG's reign, all the while having produced nothing to stop the Web's degression into a monopolistic tracking and ad shit show.
- pluma 9y ago
  I used to hate the W3C for wasting everybody's time with XHTML2, which was pretty much known to be dead on arrival from day one because browsers were barely even supporting XHTML (no, accepting XHTML and treating it as HTML tag soup doesn't count as support). About the only browser fully supporting XHTML was Firefox and authors hated it because the spec also demanded a yellow page of death if the XHTML had any syntax errors. WHATWG promised to end this ivory tower nonsense by putting the vendors before academic purity and authors before vendors and users before authors. This sounded like a great idea, but sadly recently it seems that Google has become the de facto ruler of WHATWG and "users" means "users of the Google Chrome browser", putting vendor interests above all. Others elsewhere have already decried WHATWG's flippant attitude to accessibility, ignoring established screenreader best practices and advice from accessibility experts. WHATWG is not altruistic. If W3C is too academic, WHATWG is too commercial.
  - LaGrange 9y ago
    "About the only browser fully supporting XHTML was Firefox and authors hated it because the spec also demanded a yellow page of death if the XHTML had any syntax errors." And this, kids, is why the Internet is, and always will be, such a mess. That was, and always will be, the correct approach to pages with syntax errors. Everywhere else trying to silently 'fix' syntax errors was soundly rejected as a source of innumerable bugs, but on WWW they are treated like line noise.
pecg 9y ago
I think this fact demonstrates why EME was implemented in the first place. One could argue that Mozilla is there to fight against DRM in the web, but fighting against three powerful organizations is not something to be desired.
TylerH 9y ago
Someone is salty. Feeling personally slighted today? EDIT - to clarify, you shouldn't just parrot what some Stack Overflow answer says; we all know the horror stories of blindly copying stuff from there. As you can see, W3C includes acknowledgements just fine: https://w3c.github.io/html/acknowledgements.html https://w3c.github.io/html/acknowledgements.html

andy_ppp 9y ago

Oh man, how is this possibly legal? Can the WHATWG license their work in such a way as to disallow this, if you want a fixed version number to test against (which doesn’t actually make sense, as there is no reference implementation, just various browser vendors that hopefully converge on and agreed implementation) you can just fork your own version of the WHATWG html spec, which will be more inline with browsers and have further bug fixes and corrections.

zitterbewegung 9y ago
WHATWG doesn't care about this because honestly its an organization where the browser vendors can tell you what they will implement. Having W3C do this doesn't influence any of the decisions that they make.
h1d 9y ago
Why? WHATWG doesn't make money with the spec itself, rather want it spread to wider audience, so more are informed of the upcoming changes for smoother deployment.
- naasking 9y ago
  Because that's just how copyright works. You can't erase attributions and redistribute without permission.
gsnedders 9y ago
Liberal spec licensing was a deliberate goal of the WHATWG: remember that most of the WHATWG specs have been written from scratch rather than derivatives of the existing W3C specs (which W3C host organisations hold the copyright of). It ultimately gives a further constraint on relevance: be relevant, or someone will fork your spec and implementers will follow.
om2 9y ago
WHATWG Living Standards are now licensed under CC-BY 4.0,so if the W3C continues to copy, it needs to provid appropriate acknowledgement. The lic mes does allow copying by design though.

goblin89 9y ago

Not going into politics I personally favor WHATWG’s overall presentation of the spec, but I go to W3C’s rendition for one reason—they version the spec and publish a readable changelog[0] highlighting the key changes between versions. In contrast, WHATWG’s officially recommended[1] ways of keeping up are commit history (quite messy), Twitter feed (primarily channeling commit history as it seems), and—I kid you not—manual diffing of Git revisions. [0] https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-html52-20171214/changes.html#changes https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-html52-20171214/changes.html#... [1] https://github.com/whatwg/html/blob/f8f9c6c222ce79c2f8df185521aaa291c7301419/FAQ.md#how-can-i-keep-track-of-changes-to-the-standard https://github.com/whatwg/html/blob/f8f9c6c222ce79c2f8df1855...

duskwuff 9y ago
The problem with the W3C version is that it isn't even a snapshot of any version of the WHATWG document. The W3C has modified it in some arbitrary ways which don't correspond to any "ground truth" in browser implementations. A practical example: The W3C "spec" says that the <main> tag must only appear once in a document. WHATWG and browsers agree that multiple <main> tags are perfectly fine, albeit silly.
- goblin89 9y ago
  I don’t read the rest of W3C’s spec to be honest. It’s useful to have a brief summary of changes to see where things are heading (and any convenient changelog implies some kind of versioning), but I’d likely be checking MDN or WHATWG for specifics if something catches my eye. For example, after I saw the new <dialog> tag in W3C’s changelog, I jumped to MDN to find a friendly overview of its usage and a compatibility table (spoiler, the tag isn’t supported by most major browsers).
- ChrisSD 9y ago
  But in practice that isn't a good example. Given HTML's extreme error tolerance the practical difference is zero. It only makes a difference for authors, who really should consider it an error to use more than one <main> tag.

ChrisSD 9y ago

WHATWG doesn't make a standard for HTML either. It hosts an ongoing conversation between browser vendors. Someone creating a standard from that conversation is useful, although I do agree w3c's approach isn't ideal. Personally I'd suggest HTML5 "levels" where level 1 would be fixed in stone (until HTML6) and higher levels are considered increasingly unstable.

digi_owl 9y ago
These days it feels like Google is the one writing the "standard" simply by throwing stuff into Blink that alternative engines ignore at their peril.
- Bahamut 9y ago
  Google doesn’t quite have that power - some of the things they have pushed have failed to gain traction, sometimes for very good reasons. For example, Object.observe was a proposal that Google themselves eventually unshipped from the Chrome after the JS ecosystem roundly rejected adopting the paradigms it enables, most notably for React’s unidirectional data flow (it always felt like a proposal meant specifically to optimize Angular). Google also backtracked on Web Components, choosing to revise the spec after some ideas became awkward when combined with the emergence of ES modules. The other browser vendors play an incredibly meaningful role, as well as the frontend web developer community at large.
realusername 9y ago
They already tried that in CSS with browser vendor prefixes (-moz, -webkit, ...) but unfortunately temporary features tend to be used forever so it did not work well.
- sitkack 9y ago
  Browsers need to have maps from vendor prefixes to standardized way of doing things. If an upgrade path isn't possible, the page needs to throw a warning back to the originating server in a GET request at a well known endpoint.

tannhaeuser 9y ago

It comes down to what you as web author want to accept as "standard". Just that Google, err "browser vendors", write spec texts that are changing all the time for over ten years now doesn't mean it's accepted by authors or the general public. If anything, the W3C has been handed down HTML spec work back in 1996 or so by IETF, when before HTML was spec'd in the form of RFCs with a proper DTD grammar for it's vocabulary. Anyway, I don't quite get the W3C hate, and the naive belief in WHATWG as the altruistic HTML authority when the motives and process for WHATWG are intransparent, and the Web has clearly degressed into a monopoly during WHATWG's reign, all the while having produced nothing to stop the Web's degression into a monopolistic tracking and ad shit show.

pluma 9y ago
I used to hate the W3C for wasting everybody's time with XHTML2, which was pretty much known to be dead on arrival from day one because browsers were barely even supporting XHTML (no, accepting XHTML and treating it as HTML tag soup doesn't count as support). About the only browser fully supporting XHTML was Firefox and authors hated it because the spec also demanded a yellow page of death if the XHTML had any syntax errors. WHATWG promised to end this ivory tower nonsense by putting the vendors before academic purity and authors before vendors and users before authors. This sounded like a great idea, but sadly recently it seems that Google has become the de facto ruler of WHATWG and "users" means "users of the Google Chrome browser", putting vendor interests above all. Others elsewhere have already decried WHATWG's flippant attitude to accessibility, ignoring established screenreader best practices and advice from accessibility experts. WHATWG is not altruistic. If W3C is too academic, WHATWG is too commercial.
- LaGrange 9y ago
  "About the only browser fully supporting XHTML was Firefox and authors hated it because the spec also demanded a yellow page of death if the XHTML had any syntax errors." And this, kids, is why the Internet is, and always will be, such a mess. That was, and always will be, the correct approach to pages with syntax errors. Everywhere else trying to silently 'fix' syntax errors was soundly rejected as a source of innumerable bugs, but on WWW they are treated like line noise.

pecg 9y ago

I think this fact demonstrates why EME was implemented in the first place. One could argue that Mozilla is there to fight against DRM in the web, but fighting against three powerful organizations is not something to be desired.

TylerH 9y ago

Someone is salty. Feeling personally slighted today? EDIT - to clarify, you shouldn't just parrot what some Stack Overflow answer says; we all know the horror stories of blindly copying stuff from there. As you can see, W3C includes acknowledgements just fine: https://w3c.github.io/html/acknowledgements.html https://w3c.github.io/html/acknowledgements.html