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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

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.

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.