5 ms·
Why is "creating a rendering engine from scratch" the bar here? A new player could fork Blink or WebKit.
by cwyers 9y ago
Why is "creating a rendering engine from scratch" the bar here? A new player could fork Blink or WebKit.
- da_chicken 9y agoIf you fork an existing rendering engine, you're rather implicitly using a WHATWG DOM. In order to use W3C DOM 4.1, you'd either have to modify a WHATWG DOM renderer into a W3C DOM 4.1 renderer -- which is a bit like starting with the emacs source to build a vim clone -- or to build your own. The inertia of forking an existing project pushes you towards the WHATWG implementation, not W3C. That's the point of forking. You get to preserve the forking. Further, the W3C's argument historically has been to make the DOM easier to implement from the ground up (XHTML strict) compared to the overall rats nest of HTML5, which, as far as I'm aware, still is not fully supported anywhere [1] and is very loose about document structure errors etc. So, if you're planning to implement the W3C's DOM, it makes sense that you're agreeing at least somewhat with the W3C's historical philosophy about what the web should look like and how it should behave, so you're more likely to be concerned about the implementation difficulty of HTML5. 1: https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html
- cwyers 9y agoI think you have the cart before the horse here. WHATWG is just a codification of what is. If we didn't have WHATWG, you wouldn't be freed from the burden of supporting current webpages, you just wouldn't know what that burden entails. At any rate, refactoring Blink to meet W3C's spec has to be easier to write a renderer from scratch, even if you don't care about writing noncompliant webpages, or as they're usually known, webpages.
- jsgo 9y agoIf that's the case: 1a) Why would it matter that Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and/or Apple object to W3C DOM 4.1 if they don't implement it? 1b) Why would Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and/or Apple care enough to object to W3C DOM 4.1 if they aren't implementing it? Why would they even give any effort to a competing specification and just allow it to die from inactivity? 2) Why does what is in W3C DOM 4.1 matter if the high 90s percentage of users are served by a browser in the WHATWG DOM camp? This could probably be condensed down to "Why do W3C's specifications matter at all" really.
- saas_co_de 9y agoExactly. They don't want any competing products so preventing the development of a standard they don't control is obvious.
- cwyers 9y agoIf this is about preventing competition in the browser space, then why doesn't one of the browser makers with lower market share defect from Google's position?
- dragonwriter 9y ago> Why would it matter that Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and/or Apple object to W3C DOM 4.1 if they don't implement it? It matters to the utility of the W3C DOM spec that it doesn't represent either what browsers have implemented or what they will implement. > Why would Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and/or Apple care enough to object to W3C DOM 4.1 if they aren't implementing it? They care enough because they want the W3C, if it is going to write purported web standards, to do something that won't confuse developers and lead to browser vendors fielding complaints from developers who mistake useless W3C documents for something meaningful. > Why would they even give any effort to a competing specification and just allow it to die from inactivity? They don't want to have a competing specification, though they do not seem opposed to having a specification with a different focus but consistent with WHATWG to the degree dictate by the purpose.) > Why does what is in W3C DOM 4.1 matter if the high 90s percentage of users are served by a browser in the WHATWG DOM camp? The idea is not to have opposing camps, though if W3C insists on making it an opposing camps situation, thst becomes a real issue.
- tptacek 9y agoNo, you start with a WHATWG DOM. What you do after that is up to you.