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When I was a child in elementary school, a standards committee decided to change my native language. They replaced the spelling of most words, and many grammat

When I was a child in elementary school, a standards committee decided to change my native language. They replaced the spelling of most words, and many grammatical rules. We were forced to obey these changes, any use of the old rules was counted as mistake in school. Back then, many older books were still using the old rules. By the time I left high school, almost no books with the old rules were left. All had been reprinted. All newspapers had switched. Autocorrect programs had been updated with the new rules as well. In a matter of 8 years, an entire language had changed its orthography and parts of its grammar, top-down, and it worked out fine. I’m sorry, if an entire human language with 120 million speakers can be updated top-down like that, a web spec can as well.

tptacek 9y ago
That sounds horrible.
- kuschku 9y ago
  It was amazing. The new orthography is much simpler, and has far fewer insane rules or exceptions. And most people that have seen the transition, but were born after it, or went to school during it, agree. I know it can work on this scale, I’ve seen it IRL. Many languages do stuff like this, German has the council of German language, and French has their Academy. You can do the same on the web. You just need to have all vendors working together to actually do it.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    The idea that a bunch of standards group officials can decide for the world that web pages are simply lightweight content publishing mechanisms and that real applications should be build exclusively in Flash and that that worldview can be ratified and mandated by browser vendors does not seem amazing to me. At any rate: the Internet is a market system, not a top-down autocracy.
    - jstewartmobile 9y ago
      The Internet is a network. The web is an oligopoly. Google, Google-by-proxy, and Apple fill the dog bowl, and the rest of us eat from it because it is there.
    - xg15 9y ago
      The alternative (and current reality) is that the same things are decided by about four companies in an entirely intransparent manner. At least the W3C had processes and a wide array of members.
      - tptacek 9y ago
        Isn't that just theater? None of them can tell Apple and Google what to put in their browsers; in fact, if they can't convince just one of the big 4 browser vendors to do something, their standards have no meaning at all.
        jancsika 9y ago
        It's even more work than that-- check out caniuse for SVG fonts: https://caniuse.com/#feat=svg-fonts https://caniuse.com/#feat=svg-fonts They had support in both Safari and Chrome, but never in FF or IE (nor Edge). Chrome eventually dropped the support. So I'd say if you can't get all four to implement the feature then you might as well call that part of your spec a "living standard." Those features are going to get way fewer eyeballs, fewer bugfixes, fewer reviews, fewer pieces of documentation, etc.
      - Latty 9y ago
        Uh, WHATWG is an open process - they have a similar level of control over things that W3C had. If you want to try and claim W3C ever had the power to enforce people following their specs, IE6 would like to have a word.
  - Tomte 9y ago
    If you‘re talking about German, it was not amazing, but a cultural catastrophe, and an extra-legal totalitarian nightmare.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      I assume you’re older than 22? There’s pretty much a strict split at around that age. People older seem to consistently hate it, people younger seem to consistently like it, because the new rules are much simpler. Previously, Gruß and Kuß had no info about how long to pronounce the u – Gruß and Kuss do. And until 2017, capitalizing them into GRUSS and KUSS lost this information, now GRUẞ and KUSS keep it. Previously, for many words, the rules when to split the word, when to write them together, when to use – was insanity. Now it’s all in a few easy rules. And you have to remember, this wasn’t the first time German went through such changes – ever since the advent of the printing press, when a written German language was basically "invented" from the many dialects that existed, until today, there have been proponents of a prescriptive language evolution, and they’ve had lots of influence over time. When you use Tarnen, Verfasser, or Absender, Abstand, Bücherei, Augenblick, Leidenschaft, Entwurf or Briefwechsel, Rechtschreibung or Tagebuch, Grundlage, Altertum, Erdgeschoss, tatsächlich or Hochschule, all these words were defined top-down. (All these words are just from Philipp von Zesen, Christian Wolff, and Joachim Heinrich Campe) A massive amount of what we consider "German" today was defined and changed top-down, and without these changes, German wouldn’t be recognizable.
      - Tomte 9y ago
        You‘re misinformed. Yes, the German language has had several big changes, but until the reform we‘re talking about it was linguistically „proper“ in that the existing language was described and codified. It was bottom up. In this reform some non-elected people (who just a few years earlier had said themselves that there job wasn‘t to invent German, but to describe existing use and trends) invented a whole new orthography from scratch. The new rules have never been in use anywhere throughout the German-speaking lands. They were and are pure fiction. In linguistics that‘s how you tell a layperson: they think linguistics is proscriptive. Now it seems to be... :-( And of course people under 22 don‘t care. They have never learned proper German.
- xg15 9y ago
  But it worked.
  - krylon 9y ago
    I am not sure if this is still the case today, but I remember that not too long after the new orthography / grammar rules were passed, two major news publishers announced that they would return to the old rules. Also, my sister is a linguist, and I can trigger her going on a long rant just by mentioning the Rechtschreibreform. ;-) (Personally, I think some of the new orthography rules are much simpler and consistent, so I use them. The rest I basically ignore, unless a spellchecker nags me about it.)
msoucy 9y ago
What language is this? This sounds fascinating.
- kuschku 9y ago
  My example was the implementation of the German orthography and language reforms between 1996 and 2006 (I went to elementary school in 2002, when implementing it was still in progress, and most stuff was still using the old spelling, I left high school in 2014). But French has their Academy, which has even more power over language, and afaik, Spain supposedly has similar governing bodies.
  - neuromantik8086 9y ago
    Meh- the French Academy has power over prescriptive grammar sure, but it has almost no power over what descriptive linguistics finds. Lots of Arabic and Verlan has made its way into everyday parlance. I'm not really sure that the French Academy is really that much more effective than Strunk & White is for English speakers. It primarily seems to be ceremonial / an expression of French pride.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
If you want a more tech-related example, Jobs said "no flash on iPhones", and in a few years... poof! no flash.
- Latty 9y ago
  The counter to that is pretty obvious, because if you remember Jobs also said "no native apps on iPhones", and then in a few months... poof! an app store. Flash was pretty much dead anyway, and the web platform had advanced enough to mostly replace it at that point. That wasn't true for native apps. If you want to make a standard, it has to let people do the things they want to do. Otherwise, people will just use a different (or no) standard.
  - jstewartmobile 9y ago
    I'm not really getting into the standards thing here--just throwing some ammo to the underdog. My only point is that there are only a handful of companies with the cash, the talent, and the inclination to tackle these things, and most of them are near if not total monopolies, so as long as what they put out there isn't a blatant kick-in-the-nuts, most of us will just accept it. iPhone was a compelling product, didn't have flash, everyone migrated to Javascript ASAP. Google is practically a monopoly, and when webmaster tools tells people to jump, watch everyone piss away a weekend to add microformats and shave 5% off of a few 40k images. Serfs. We are all serfs.
djrogers 9y ago
Apples and oranges - when you introduce a government mandate, you remove the market. @tptacek's aregument is clearly about market forces in publicly defined standards, not government enforced ones. I'm pretty sure the last thing anyone really wants is what we'd wind up with if web standards were left to government dictates...
- kuschku 9y ago
  There’s no need for a government to enforce standards on the web – there’s already an oligopoly that can do it on their own. In fact, there’s a single company that can just outright dictate web standards, because they hold almost 70% of the browser market: Google.

tptacek 9y ago

That sounds horrible.

kuschku 9y ago
It was amazing. The new orthography is much simpler, and has far fewer insane rules or exceptions. And most people that have seen the transition, but were born after it, or went to school during it, agree. I know it can work on this scale, I’ve seen it IRL. Many languages do stuff like this, German has the council of German language, and French has their Academy. You can do the same on the web. You just need to have all vendors working together to actually do it.
- tptacek 9y ago
  The idea that a bunch of standards group officials can decide for the world that web pages are simply lightweight content publishing mechanisms and that real applications should be build exclusively in Flash and that that worldview can be ratified and mandated by browser vendors does not seem amazing to me. At any rate: the Internet is a market system, not a top-down autocracy.
  - jstewartmobile 9y ago
    The Internet is a network. The web is an oligopoly. Google, Google-by-proxy, and Apple fill the dog bowl, and the rest of us eat from it because it is there.
  - xg15 9y ago
    The alternative (and current reality) is that the same things are decided by about four companies in an entirely intransparent manner. At least the W3C had processes and a wide array of members.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      Isn't that just theater? None of them can tell Apple and Google what to put in their browsers; in fact, if they can't convince just one of the big 4 browser vendors to do something, their standards have no meaning at all.
      - jancsika 9y ago
        It's even more work than that-- check out caniuse for SVG fonts: https://caniuse.com/#feat=svg-fonts https://caniuse.com/#feat=svg-fonts They had support in both Safari and Chrome, but never in FF or IE (nor Edge). Chrome eventually dropped the support. So I'd say if you can't get all four to implement the feature then you might as well call that part of your spec a "living standard." Those features are going to get way fewer eyeballs, fewer bugfixes, fewer reviews, fewer pieces of documentation, etc.
    - Latty 9y ago
      Uh, WHATWG is an open process - they have a similar level of control over things that W3C had. If you want to try and claim W3C ever had the power to enforce people following their specs, IE6 would like to have a word.
- Tomte 9y ago
  If you‘re talking about German, it was not amazing, but a cultural catastrophe, and an extra-legal totalitarian nightmare.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    I assume you’re older than 22? There’s pretty much a strict split at around that age. People older seem to consistently hate it, people younger seem to consistently like it, because the new rules are much simpler. Previously, Gruß and Kuß had no info about how long to pronounce the u – Gruß and Kuss do. And until 2017, capitalizing them into GRUSS and KUSS lost this information, now GRUẞ and KUSS keep it. Previously, for many words, the rules when to split the word, when to write them together, when to use – was insanity. Now it’s all in a few easy rules. And you have to remember, this wasn’t the first time German went through such changes – ever since the advent of the printing press, when a written German language was basically "invented" from the many dialects that existed, until today, there have been proponents of a prescriptive language evolution, and they’ve had lots of influence over time. When you use Tarnen, Verfasser, or Absender, Abstand, Bücherei, Augenblick, Leidenschaft, Entwurf or Briefwechsel, Rechtschreibung or Tagebuch, Grundlage, Altertum, Erdgeschoss, tatsächlich or Hochschule, all these words were defined top-down. (All these words are just from Philipp von Zesen, Christian Wolff, and Joachim Heinrich Campe) A massive amount of what we consider "German" today was defined and changed top-down, and without these changes, German wouldn’t be recognizable.
    - Tomte 9y ago
      You‘re misinformed. Yes, the German language has had several big changes, but until the reform we‘re talking about it was linguistically „proper“ in that the existing language was described and codified. It was bottom up. In this reform some non-elected people (who just a few years earlier had said themselves that there job wasn‘t to invent German, but to describe existing use and trends) invented a whole new orthography from scratch. The new rules have never been in use anywhere throughout the German-speaking lands. They were and are pure fiction. In linguistics that‘s how you tell a layperson: they think linguistics is proscriptive. Now it seems to be... :-( And of course people under 22 don‘t care. They have never learned proper German.
xg15 9y ago
But it worked.
- krylon 9y ago
  I am not sure if this is still the case today, but I remember that not too long after the new orthography / grammar rules were passed, two major news publishers announced that they would return to the old rules. Also, my sister is a linguist, and I can trigger her going on a long rant just by mentioning the Rechtschreibreform. ;-) (Personally, I think some of the new orthography rules are much simpler and consistent, so I use them. The rest I basically ignore, unless a spellchecker nags me about it.)

msoucy 9y ago

What language is this? This sounds fascinating.

kuschku 9y ago
My example was the implementation of the German orthography and language reforms between 1996 and 2006 (I went to elementary school in 2002, when implementing it was still in progress, and most stuff was still using the old spelling, I left high school in 2014). But French has their Academy, which has even more power over language, and afaik, Spain supposedly has similar governing bodies.
- neuromantik8086 9y ago
  Meh- the French Academy has power over prescriptive grammar sure, but it has almost no power over what descriptive linguistics finds. Lots of Arabic and Verlan has made its way into everyday parlance. I'm not really sure that the French Academy is really that much more effective than Strunk & White is for English speakers. It primarily seems to be ceremonial / an expression of French pride.

jstewartmobile 9y ago

If you want a more tech-related example, Jobs said "no flash on iPhones", and in a few years... poof! no flash.

Latty 9y ago
The counter to that is pretty obvious, because if you remember Jobs also said "no native apps on iPhones", and then in a few months... poof! an app store. Flash was pretty much dead anyway, and the web platform had advanced enough to mostly replace it at that point. That wasn't true for native apps. If you want to make a standard, it has to let people do the things they want to do. Otherwise, people will just use a different (or no) standard.
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  I'm not really getting into the standards thing here--just throwing some ammo to the underdog. My only point is that there are only a handful of companies with the cash, the talent, and the inclination to tackle these things, and most of them are near if not total monopolies, so as long as what they put out there isn't a blatant kick-in-the-nuts, most of us will just accept it. iPhone was a compelling product, didn't have flash, everyone migrated to Javascript ASAP. Google is practically a monopoly, and when webmaster tools tells people to jump, watch everyone piss away a weekend to add microformats and shave 5% off of a few 40k images. Serfs. We are all serfs.

djrogers 9y ago

Apples and oranges - when you introduce a government mandate, you remove the market. @tptacek's aregument is clearly about market forces in publicly defined standards, not government enforced ones. I'm pretty sure the last thing anyone really wants is what we'd wind up with if web standards were left to government dictates...

kuschku 9y ago
There’s no need for a government to enforce standards on the web – there’s already an oligopoly that can do it on their own. In fact, there’s a single company that can just outright dictate web standards, because they hold almost 70% of the browser market: Google.