49 ms·

W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM

493 points by klez 7y ago

chronicler 7y ago
Impressive
Athas 7y ago
This looks like W3C capitulating: > WHATWG maintains the HTML and DOM Living Standards Which is understandable, since all of the main implementers of HTML are active in WHATWG, not so much W3C. What will be the concrete impact of this agreement?
- domenicd 7y ago
  The biggest concrete impact, in my opinion, will be the removal of confusion in the web developer community around where things are specified. Currently W3C forks (https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Fork_tracking https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Fork_tracking) are often linked to as authoritative, or misleading show up in Google search results higher than the document they are forked from. Per the Memorandum of Understanding at https://www.w3.org/2019/04/WHATWG-W3C-MOU.html#transition https://www.w3.org/2019/04/WHATWG-W3C-MOU.html#transition, after the W3C first marks a WHATWG Review Draft as a W3C Recommendation, all the forks will be marked as "Superceded" with redirects to the WHATWG originals.
Multicomp 7y ago
Extremely condensed version: W3C is giving up publishing future HTML and DOM standards. They will focus on writing 'recommendations' for the WHATWG's living standards. Versioned vs living HTML discussions aside, I personally admit some mild sadness that the original group responsible for maintaining Sir TBL's work on HTML has been forced to give up.
- cotelletta 7y ago
  These are the same people who created XHTML, an ivory tower idea nobody was waiting for... who didn't support the most popular layout method at the time, tables, in their new styling language CSS. W3C became irrelevant because they kept thinking they could just tell the entire web what to do, that they'd make enormous technical investments to satisfy the W3C's latest fashions. I interacted with them once, over their seamless iframe proposal. I had to point out that the two biggest uses of iframes at the time, i.e. Twitter embeds and Facebook apps, could not make use of it, despite being a perfect fit. They just hadn't considered that.
  - zmix 7y ago
    > who didn't support the most popular layout method at the time, tables I can do tables just fine in XHTML. And luckily, tables have become redundant as layout technique, since CSS would do that, already then. The nice thing with X(HT)ML is, that you can place queries against any document, natively.
    - cotelletta 7y ago
      Did you miss the 5-10 years during which every CSS designer tortured themselves replicating tables with floats? Google 'pure css page footer' to see the wreckage. CSS tables took years to be supported, and even then, only brought back what people had been irrationally told to stay away from. It took another 5 years for flex box to become usable, adding something actually new. To this day, changing a site's entire design without touching its markup is a mirage. It only works in contrived scenarios with extremely artificial restrictions, and nobody does it in the real world. CSS Zen Garden was demoscene.
      - cygx 7y ago
        Personally, I was fine with ditching tables, but stuff like differing box models, unequal CSS support, quirks modes, etc did make for a rather painful cross-browser development experience: Making things work out correctly (or at least gracefully degrade) in multipe IE versions, Mozilla, Opera, ... could be a challenge.
      - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        Tabular markup for non-tabulated data is not rational & semantic markup is certainly not irrational. You don't come from print design by any chance? With flexbox, for example, you can change order of appearance contrary to the code order in the markup. It's not a mirage. Anyone who's used a browser's reader mode, or distilled view (as Brave calls it), knows the usefulness of applying different styles to a fixed markup. Separation of presentation is possible. Indeed now we've moved to responsive design and the number of devices and UA has exploded the separation of design and data is coming in to its own -- but instead pixel-perfection is still being chased with a billion @media declarations.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  It is a sad day, but for a long time now W3C has been a figurehead and nothing more. It was like Japan's modern-day emperor. It carried no weight to actually contradict the WHATWG's version of things. So it's simply acknowledging that fact.
jl6 7y ago
Sounds like a recognition of WHATWG as the master, with W3C becoming more of a publishing / vetting organization for snapshots of the standard?
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  I guess it's more a recognition of the limited resources of both W3C and WHATWG, of the fact that there's a need for a "real" fixed-in-time and versioned document describing HTML rather than a collaboration workspace (WHATWG's "living standard") and W3C's choice to not die on the particular hill of redacting WHATWG texts. Though practically speaking, W3C HTML 5.2 (the last completed recommendation) was sponsored by The Paciello Group and MS before that, and with MS' withdrawal from browser development they also gave up redacting W3C HTML to fit IE's features set. I would love to be corrected by an insider, but that's what I could make up from publically available info.
  - gsnedders 7y ago
    As far as I'm aware, MS continued to be involved with the W3C HTML much longer than other browsers due to the W3C patent policy, which the WHATWG only had any equivalent of as of December 2017. Note also the W3C specs weren't really redacted versions of the WHATWG spec, especially in later years: they were pretty much complete forks and moving changes between them non-trivial.
- Angostura 7y ago
  Or it could be a relationship similar to that between the IAB and IETF
- sjwright 7y ago
  When in reality the actual implementations are the master, WHATWG are the first to describe the implementations' intended behaviors, and W3C is a glorified proxy server with aggressive caching.
ksec 7y ago
W3C will now publish a Recommendation instead of a "version" as such. The Recommendation will be from a "Review Draft" published by WHATWG, this draft will then go through the W3C process (Candidate Recommendation → Proposed Recommendation → Recommendation). And then there is patent exclusion ( What? ) Anyway I don't see anything new to developers. Apart from the politics and two parties bury the hatchet.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Why don't W3C just leave it to WHATWG entirely? Why do we need two groups involved? Why should I put any value in what W3C recommends? What would they ever recommend instead of WHATWG?
  - klez 7y ago
    > Why should I put any value in what W3C recommends? For the same reason you put any value in, e.g., ISO or ANSI. Because others recognize them as the standard organization and put value in what they recommend.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - danarmak 7y ago
      But no browser maker recognizes the W3C standard or claims to implement it, so what good is it?
      - klez 7y ago
        That no browser maker recognizes W3C's standard is a bit misleading. MDN (i.e. Mozilla) quotes the w3c recommendations all over the place. Google, from what I found around, cites nothing, not even WHATWG. Webkit cites MDN (which cites w3c) as a source.
        sjwright 7y ago
jsgyx 7y ago
So W3C is signing to confirm their irrelevance?
- klez 7y ago
  FWIW, w3c publishes and standardize a lot more than just HTML and DOM. So calling it irrelevant seems a bit of a stretch.
  - geezerjay 7y ago
    I would also add that having third-parties propose specifications to standardization bodies is a widely established practice. In fact, standards are supposes to reflect industry practices and are a way to establish common ground.
- baybal2 7y ago
  Indeed, and so will Mozilla do once Google and Apple decide that they no longer need them to legitimise WHATWG. Mozilla execs dug a ditch for W3C, but fell in it themselves. Mozilla set itself on this trajectory once they stopped their backing of W3C. The only point of Firefox was it delivering quick, glitch free, standard compliant web. With web standards becoming defunct, it is there no more. But hey, Mozilla execs can keep assigning themselves high six digit salaries...
  - sheepdestroyer 7y ago
    What could Mozilla have done with W3C making HTML5 DRM (EME) part of the official spec? That stance is the main reason W3C lost support from the community (They not only lost Mozilla but also EFF and a lot of trust from independent developers). That DRM affair was also conducted in a very shady way with secret votes, etc...
    - mehh 7y ago
      Lost trust from a small but very vocal bunch of disruptive people and others who don't know what that actual issue is but seemed like a good band wagon to jump on grrrr big business giving it to the man!
ChrisSD 7y ago
I still maintain that the "living standard" is an oxymoron. It's a collaborative browser dev document. Don't get me wrong, that's great. However for everyone else an unversioned document, any part of which can change at any moment, is not what's usually thought of as a standard.
- baybal2 7y ago
  It isn't great at all, because even that living standard is never being implemented up to spec, often by the same people who wrote it, and the current browser support status usually ends up being "what's written in bugzilla"
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    There are very comprehensive browser support matrices at https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ (JavaScript features) and https://caniuse.com/ https://caniuse.com/ (DOM features). It's only for very recently implemented features that you should need to look in bugzilla.
    - realityking 7y ago
      JavaScript (EcmaScript) follows a more traditional standard process, though at a very high pace. caniuse.com is amazing but let‘s not kid ourselves what it covers. It‘s about feature availability. Some feature might have 1000s of normative behaviors specifics but their being condensed down to there/not there.
    - domenicd 7y ago
      A better resources is https://wpt.fyi/ https://wpt.fyi/, which contains comprehensive test results in all browser engines. These days, at least for WHATWG specs, tests are required before any changes land in the specification, so wpt.fyi will necessarily contain all browser support for all features landed in the specs.
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      "should", sure, but vendors (I mostly run into this w/Chrome but other vendors do it too) happily just ignore the spec because it's inconvenient and sometimes explicitly have no plans to ever align with it. I recently ran into a case where Chrome was intentionally moving away from the spec without making any effort to update the spec, because being correct was... annoying. Not impossible or bad for users, just annoying. At the time the behavior worked right in Firefox and Edge but now that Chrome is going to ignore the spec I suspect the other vendors might too. (For reference, it was an issue related to the lifetime of javascript objects for frames that have been unloaded or navigated) This sort of thing will never appear in a compatibility matrix. You find out when it breaks your code.
baybal2 7y ago
Remember, WHATWG began with childish rant of few Mozilla engineers about w3c stalling xForms. 13 years later now, did they get what they want? No, no xForms, no xhtml, no strict validation, nothing.
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  As someone deep in the markup world, I'd say thank god XForms didn't make it, though I don't know Mozilla started WHATWG, let alone for promoting XForms of all things (Mozilla/Netscape once introduced JavaScript). WHATWG was Ian Hickson's (of Google) project, started out very successfully in adding capabilities to the web, but sadly turned into an instrument for browser monopoly. As for validation, you can parse/validate all published versions of HTML, including W3C HTML 5, 5.1, and 5.2 using SGML and my SGML DTD grammar(s) [1] for HTML 5.x. SGML (ISO 8879) is the original markup meta-language on which both HTML and XML are based. XML was once started as a subset of SGML (dropping tag inference/omission, SGML-style empty elements, attribute shortforms, and other features requiring DTD declarations for the concrete markup language to parse). [1] http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html
  - baybal2 7y ago
    > WHATWG was Ian Hickson's (of Google) project But WHATWG would've never flew if not him getting those dissenting Mozilla devs on board
  - gsnedders 7y ago
    > WHATWG was Ian Hickson's (of Google) project He was at Opera when it started, back in 2004. The original W3C Workshop proposal to do Web Forms 2.0 was a Opera/Mozilla joint paper, and a few months later when the WHATWG started Apple had joined. I don't think Google's name was attached until Hixie moved to work there (admittedly not that much later).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
firecall 7y ago
Is WHATWG pronounceable?
- louniks 7y ago
  I instinctively read it as "what-wee-gee"
  - hober 7y ago
    That is how a lot of us say it.
- sjwright 7y ago
  I always thought it to be "what wig".
- daurnimator 7y ago
  "What working group"
- cjslep 7y ago
  "What double you gee"
- cwmma 7y ago
  what-wig
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    I say "wot-wug", but then I've never actually had a spoken conversation about web-standards in over 20yrs of making websites (mostly non-commercially)
    - cwmma 7y ago
      depending on accent, those pronunciations can be pretty close
- panic 7y ago
martin_a 7y ago
Maybe it's just me, but I've never heard about the WHATWG before. And for everybody like me, that acronym stands for "Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group".
- skrebbel 7y ago
  WHATWG is basically the browser vendors sidelining W3C to discuss what features HTML etc should have. The news today is that the W3C finally accepted that situation.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    It's not like anybody of us voted for W3C either (so it's not like one body is the "legitimate" one and other is not). And the W3C had stalled progress so much in the 00s and 10s, that it deservedly got sidelined.
    - austincheney 7y ago
      They were focused on data organization and security instead of rounded corners or querySelectors, but most frontend developers saw that as stalling.
      - marcosdumay 7y ago
        They were focused on replacing web development practices. Something that was much needed, but completely uncalled for.
      - bzbarsky 7y ago
        As someone who was involved in some of the W3C work at the time, it's not clear to what extent they were focused on "security" at all.
      - coldtea 7y ago
        Neither data organization nor security is their role... One belongs to the backend to decide, the other is for HTTP/S-level specs and Javascript, none of which are or should be W3C's concern.
shumailakhan 7y ago
http://licensekeys.co/tuxera-ntfs-crack/ http://licensekeys.co/tuxera-ntfs-crack/
inglor 7y ago
In practice I've found that web standards are mostly driven by people who are willing to spend the time and effort to iron our all the edge cases. I've had a very pleasant experience contributing to things like `fetch` and negative experiences contributing to some other things - essentially it's a "people problem" more than a technology problem.
- dillonmckay 7y ago
  Isn’t that the case with most human committees?
- kevingadd 7y ago
  I find the pleasantness of the standards process depends on how many people have strong opinions about the thing you're working on. Being involved in 'new' standards like fetch or gamepad or webgl is generally pretty relaxed because while it's interesting to many people, there aren't a bunch of people with Past Experience with the new api/standard and they aren't about to dedicate a bunch of time to doing it themselves. Coming in to try and fix problems or propose improvements for existing stuff like canvas or XHR or whatever is another matter entirely, as you've probably noticed. Thanks for helping make fetch good!
jrochkind1 7y ago
On the one hand, good. On the other, it seems like just complete capitulation by the W3C; WHATWG makes all the real decisions still, W3C now performs important administrative services for free, turning the "living standard" into an actual usable standard, without actually having any meaningful power over the results. WHATWG gets to do the part that matters without having to do the hard part, W3C does the hard part for them without any control over what matters. On the other other hand, sometimes when the battle is already lost, formal capitulation is all that's left. The browser vendors took control of the web standards process from any body that might represent/balance multiple constituencies/interests, and that's just how it is now.
- rimliu 7y ago
  The browser vendors always had control. W3C could put anything they want into the standards, it does not matter if nobody implements it.
- mcchampion 7y ago
  W3C did try to balance multiple constituencies for HTML, but it couldn't find consensus among them, and broad consensus is the basis for its authority. WHATWG didn't so much take control of the standards process as recognize that what actually works on the web defines the "stadard" It's not a capitulation, it's a way to exert influence in a world that respects rough consensus and running code more than formal processes and authority. Under the agreement, W3C has the power to ratify (or not) changes to HTML/DOM that align with the needs of its broad community for accessibility, internationalization, privacy, security, etc. The agreement provides a way for experts in those "horizontal" areas to participate more effectively in WHATWG to get improvements made upstream, rather than downstream in what amounted to a fork. And yes, W3C provides the service of providing vetted snapshots of the Living Standards into more formal standards that governments and other standards bodies can reference and ratify. That's adding real value for some constituencies.
  - jrochkind1 7y ago
    If they choose "not to ratify" something... will it have any effect on browser behavior at all? I don't think so. It'd just be a standard none of the relevant software cares about. Pretty useless to anyone. (Much like current W3C html standards...) Seems to me W3C will straight up be acting as administrative staff for WHATWG, providing free labor to do the "hard parts" of providing a useful standard, without much decision-making ability. Without much decision-making ability is indeed the status quo. Now they're providing some free labor too. But it's certainly less pointless than what they were doing before, so.
sonnyblarney 7y ago
The only thing that matters is what Chrome and iOS Safari decide to do. Sadly.
domenicd 7y ago
Folks may find the more-detailed blog post linked at https://www.w3.org/blog/2019/05/w3c-and-whatwg-to-work-together-to-advance-the-open-web-platform/ https://www.w3.org/blog/2019/05/w3c-and-whatwg-to-work-toget... to be more clear. Also, for the full details, here is a direct link to the agreement: https://www.w3.org/2019/04/WHATWG-W3C-MOU.html https://www.w3.org/2019/04/WHATWG-W3C-MOU.html
snek 7y ago
To clarify why WHATWG exists and why W3C lost power over the HTML spec: Around 2004 W3C abandoned organizational effort on HTML in favor of things like XHTML2, XEvents, semantic web, etc. The WHATWG was formed in reaction to that, rewriting HTML completely from its W3C HTML 4.0 version for example to make it better for web applications and to specify things in more detail. Since the formation of WHATWG, W3C HTML specs became copy-pastes (often not even correct copy-pastes) in an effort to satisfy paying member companies (https://github.com/w3c/charter-html/issues/14#issuecomment-108606731 https://github.com/w3c/charter-html/issues/14#issuecomment-1...). You can see everything WHATWG maintains here: https://platform.html5.org/ https://platform.html5.org/ (they are the green question mark) The W3C still maintains a good chunk web standards though, such as CSS, Wasm, web security, etc.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- austincheney 7y ago
  That explains the HTML spec but not the DOM spec.
  - olliej 7y ago
    The DOM is specified as part of the HTML spec. The whatwg HTML spec defines exactly how html is parsed, and exactly how every element interacts the scripting environment. Just defining the grammar is not sufficient. Historically for instance something like <bold>foo<italic>bar</bold>baz</italic> Produced a different DOM tree in different browsers. WHATWG specified what should actually happen. IIRC IE managed to produce a DOM graph rather than a tree in the above example.
    - austincheney 7y ago
      The DOM is a completely separate unrelated specification. https://dom.spec.whatwg.org https://dom.spec.whatwg.org
      - 7y ago
BinaryIdiot 7y ago
It's probably an unpopular opinion but I'm all for progress that may eventually lead to W3C's complete irrelevance. I've talked with folks at the WHATWG before, _Anyone_ can provide input and work with them. With the W3C it's, what, like $30k for the cheapest option and that barely gets you in the door. The W3C is too expensive to ever let small businesses or individuals have impact. I'd love to see more groups like the WHATWG specifically for this reason.
- steveax 7y ago
  Invited experts don’t pay any fees: https://www.w3.org/participate/invited-experts/ https://www.w3.org/participate/invited-experts/
  - BinaryIdiot 7y ago
    I mean, I get that. But if you're a business or even an individual who was an interest in how the internet is being shaped you have to either pay a ton of money or somehow get them to invite you. WHATWG seems to have found a way to manage the noise of allowing essentially anyone in to comment and contribute.
- frivoal 7y ago
  There were serious issues with the way HTML was done at W3C, and this agreement between W3C and the WHATWG is a good thing. However, all W3C specs are developed in the open, nowadays on github, and feedback from anyone anywhere is taken seriously. Don't like something about css? go here: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues. Something wrong with SVG? https://github.com/w3c/svgwg/issues https://github.com/w3c/svgwg/issues. An issue with the Payment Handler API? https://w3c.github.io/payment-handler/ https://w3c.github.io/payment-handler/. Dislike the way W3C itself works? That's here: https://github.com/w3c/w3process https://github.com/w3c/w3process Yes, the W3C is a membership based organization, and if you want to vote for instance on who gets to be on its Advisory Board, or have a say in the Charter of Working Groups, you need to be a member, and pay. For the WHATWG, you don't get to vote on who's on the Steering Group, and you don't get a say on what new Workstreams are started / changed / stopped, even if you did want to pay. That's up to Google, Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla. Sure anybody can suggest stuff (but that's true at the W3C too), but they decide, and there's no way into that club. Not to claim that W3C is perfect. Plenty of improvements are needed. But claiming that small business or individuals cannot participate just isn't true.
xg15 7y ago
Out of couriosity, does the WHATWG have any commitment to keep the "review drafts" meaningful (e.g., by orienting the things that are actually supported by browsers along them)? Will it mean anything if one of them becomes a W3C Recommendation? If the W3C sends a draft back with requests for corrections, will anyone from WHATWG actually be motivated to make those corrections? Or is this more of a "pick any commit you like and we can declare it the 'review draft' if that makes you happy" kind of thing? Also, by this agreement, does the W3C have any avenues to influence HTML/DOM design work that exceed those of an average volunteer an the WHATWG mailing list?
DhanushDivara 7y ago
Good

493 points by klez 7y ago

Impressive

This looks like W3C capitulating: > WHATWG maintains the HTML and DOM Living Standards Which is understandable, since all of the main implementers of HTML are active in WHATWG, not so much W3C. What will be the concrete impact of this agreement?

domenicd 7y ago
The biggest concrete impact, in my opinion, will be the removal of confusion in the web developer community around where things are specified. Currently W3C forks (https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Fork_tracking https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Fork_tracking) are often linked to as authoritative, or misleading show up in Google search results higher than the document they are forked from. Per the Memorandum of Understanding at https://www.w3.org/2019/04/WHATWG-W3C-MOU.html#transition https://www.w3.org/2019/04/WHATWG-W3C-MOU.html#transition, after the W3C first marks a WHATWG Review Draft as a W3C Recommendation, all the forks will be marked as "Superceded" with redirects to the WHATWG originals.

Multicomp 7y ago

Extremely condensed version: W3C is giving up publishing future HTML and DOM standards. They will focus on writing 'recommendations' for the WHATWG's living standards. Versioned vs living HTML discussions aside, I personally admit some mild sadness that the original group responsible for maintaining Sir TBL's work on HTML has been forced to give up.

cotelletta 7y ago
These are the same people who created XHTML, an ivory tower idea nobody was waiting for... who didn't support the most popular layout method at the time, tables, in their new styling language CSS. W3C became irrelevant because they kept thinking they could just tell the entire web what to do, that they'd make enormous technical investments to satisfy the W3C's latest fashions. I interacted with them once, over their seamless iframe proposal. I had to point out that the two biggest uses of iframes at the time, i.e. Twitter embeds and Facebook apps, could not make use of it, despite being a perfect fit. They just hadn't considered that.
- zmix 7y ago
  > who didn't support the most popular layout method at the time, tables I can do tables just fine in XHTML. And luckily, tables have become redundant as layout technique, since CSS would do that, already then. The nice thing with X(HT)ML is, that you can place queries against any document, natively.
  - cotelletta 7y ago
    Did you miss the 5-10 years during which every CSS designer tortured themselves replicating tables with floats? Google 'pure css page footer' to see the wreckage. CSS tables took years to be supported, and even then, only brought back what people had been irrationally told to stay away from. It took another 5 years for flex box to become usable, adding something actually new. To this day, changing a site's entire design without touching its markup is a mirage. It only works in contrived scenarios with extremely artificial restrictions, and nobody does it in the real world. CSS Zen Garden was demoscene.
    - cygx 7y ago
      Personally, I was fine with ditching tables, but stuff like differing box models, unequal CSS support, quirks modes, etc did make for a rather painful cross-browser development experience: Making things work out correctly (or at least gracefully degrade) in multipe IE versions, Mozilla, Opera, ... could be a challenge.
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      Tabular markup for non-tabulated data is not rational & semantic markup is certainly not irrational. You don't come from print design by any chance? With flexbox, for example, you can change order of appearance contrary to the code order in the markup. It's not a mirage. Anyone who's used a browser's reader mode, or distilled view (as Brave calls it), knows the usefulness of applying different styles to a fixed markup. Separation of presentation is possible. Indeed now we've moved to responsive design and the number of devices and UA has exploded the separation of design and data is coming in to its own -- but instead pixel-perfection is still being chased with a billion @media declarations.
_bxg1 7y ago
It is a sad day, but for a long time now W3C has been a figurehead and nothing more. It was like Japan's modern-day emperor. It carried no weight to actually contradict the WHATWG's version of things. So it's simply acknowledging that fact.

jl6 7y ago

Sounds like a recognition of WHATWG as the master, with W3C becoming more of a publishing / vetting organization for snapshots of the standard?

tannhaeuser 7y ago
I guess it's more a recognition of the limited resources of both W3C and WHATWG, of the fact that there's a need for a "real" fixed-in-time and versioned document describing HTML rather than a collaboration workspace (WHATWG's "living standard") and W3C's choice to not die on the particular hill of redacting WHATWG texts. Though practically speaking, W3C HTML 5.2 (the last completed recommendation) was sponsored by The Paciello Group and MS before that, and with MS' withdrawal from browser development they also gave up redacting W3C HTML to fit IE's features set. I would love to be corrected by an insider, but that's what I could make up from publically available info.
- gsnedders 7y ago
  As far as I'm aware, MS continued to be involved with the W3C HTML much longer than other browsers due to the W3C patent policy, which the WHATWG only had any equivalent of as of December 2017. Note also the W3C specs weren't really redacted versions of the WHATWG spec, especially in later years: they were pretty much complete forks and moving changes between them non-trivial.
Angostura 7y ago
Or it could be a relationship similar to that between the IAB and IETF
sjwright 7y ago
When in reality the actual implementations are the master, WHATWG are the first to describe the implementations' intended behaviors, and W3C is a glorified proxy server with aggressive caching.

ksec 7y ago

W3C will now publish a Recommendation instead of a "version" as such. The Recommendation will be from a "Review Draft" published by WHATWG, this draft will then go through the W3C process (Candidate Recommendation → Proposed Recommendation → Recommendation). And then there is patent exclusion ( What? ) Anyway I don't see anything new to developers. Apart from the politics and two parties bury the hatchet.

chrisseaton 7y ago
Why don't W3C just leave it to WHATWG entirely? Why do we need two groups involved? Why should I put any value in what W3C recommends? What would they ever recommend instead of WHATWG?
- klez 7y ago
  > Why should I put any value in what W3C recommends? For the same reason you put any value in, e.g., ISO or ANSI. Because others recognize them as the standard organization and put value in what they recommend.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - danarmak 7y ago
    But no browser maker recognizes the W3C standard or claims to implement it, so what good is it?
    - klez 7y ago
      That no browser maker recognizes W3C's standard is a bit misleading. MDN (i.e. Mozilla) quotes the w3c recommendations all over the place. Google, from what I found around, cites nothing, not even WHATWG. Webkit cites MDN (which cites w3c) as a source.
      - sjwright 7y ago

jsgyx 7y ago

So W3C is signing to confirm their irrelevance?

klez 7y ago
FWIW, w3c publishes and standardize a lot more than just HTML and DOM. So calling it irrelevant seems a bit of a stretch.
- geezerjay 7y ago
  I would also add that having third-parties propose specifications to standardization bodies is a widely established practice. In fact, standards are supposes to reflect industry practices and are a way to establish common ground.
baybal2 7y ago
Indeed, and so will Mozilla do once Google and Apple decide that they no longer need them to legitimise WHATWG. Mozilla execs dug a ditch for W3C, but fell in it themselves. Mozilla set itself on this trajectory once they stopped their backing of W3C. The only point of Firefox was it delivering quick, glitch free, standard compliant web. With web standards becoming defunct, it is there no more. But hey, Mozilla execs can keep assigning themselves high six digit salaries...
- sheepdestroyer 7y ago
  What could Mozilla have done with W3C making HTML5 DRM (EME) part of the official spec? That stance is the main reason W3C lost support from the community (They not only lost Mozilla but also EFF and a lot of trust from independent developers). That DRM affair was also conducted in a very shady way with secret votes, etc...
  - mehh 7y ago
    Lost trust from a small but very vocal bunch of disruptive people and others who don't know what that actual issue is but seemed like a good band wagon to jump on grrrr big business giving it to the man!

ChrisSD 7y ago

I still maintain that the "living standard" is an oxymoron. It's a collaborative browser dev document. Don't get me wrong, that's great. However for everyone else an unversioned document, any part of which can change at any moment, is not what's usually thought of as a standard.

baybal2 7y ago
It isn't great at all, because even that living standard is never being implemented up to spec, often by the same people who wrote it, and the current browser support status usually ends up being "what's written in bugzilla"
- nicoburns 7y ago
  There are very comprehensive browser support matrices at https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ (JavaScript features) and https://caniuse.com/ https://caniuse.com/ (DOM features). It's only for very recently implemented features that you should need to look in bugzilla.
  - realityking 7y ago
    JavaScript (EcmaScript) follows a more traditional standard process, though at a very high pace. caniuse.com is amazing but let‘s not kid ourselves what it covers. It‘s about feature availability. Some feature might have 1000s of normative behaviors specifics but their being condensed down to there/not there.
  - domenicd 7y ago
    A better resources is https://wpt.fyi/ https://wpt.fyi/, which contains comprehensive test results in all browser engines. These days, at least for WHATWG specs, tests are required before any changes land in the specification, so wpt.fyi will necessarily contain all browser support for all features landed in the specs.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    "should", sure, but vendors (I mostly run into this w/Chrome but other vendors do it too) happily just ignore the spec because it's inconvenient and sometimes explicitly have no plans to ever align with it. I recently ran into a case where Chrome was intentionally moving away from the spec without making any effort to update the spec, because being correct was... annoying. Not impossible or bad for users, just annoying. At the time the behavior worked right in Firefox and Edge but now that Chrome is going to ignore the spec I suspect the other vendors might too. (For reference, it was an issue related to the lifetime of javascript objects for frames that have been unloaded or navigated) This sort of thing will never appear in a compatibility matrix. You find out when it breaks your code.

baybal2 7y ago

Remember, WHATWG began with childish rant of few Mozilla engineers about w3c stalling xForms. 13 years later now, did they get what they want? No, no xForms, no xhtml, no strict validation, nothing.

tannhaeuser 7y ago
As someone deep in the markup world, I'd say thank god XForms didn't make it, though I don't know Mozilla started WHATWG, let alone for promoting XForms of all things (Mozilla/Netscape once introduced JavaScript). WHATWG was Ian Hickson's (of Google) project, started out very successfully in adding capabilities to the web, but sadly turned into an instrument for browser monopoly. As for validation, you can parse/validate all published versions of HTML, including W3C HTML 5, 5.1, and 5.2 using SGML and my SGML DTD grammar(s) [1] for HTML 5.x. SGML (ISO 8879) is the original markup meta-language on which both HTML and XML are based. XML was once started as a subset of SGML (dropping tag inference/omission, SGML-style empty elements, attribute shortforms, and other features requiring DTD declarations for the concrete markup language to parse). [1] http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html
- baybal2 7y ago
  > WHATWG was Ian Hickson's (of Google) project But WHATWG would've never flew if not him getting those dissenting Mozilla devs on board
- gsnedders 7y ago
  > WHATWG was Ian Hickson's (of Google) project He was at Opera when it started, back in 2004. The original W3C Workshop proposal to do Web Forms 2.0 was a Opera/Mozilla joint paper, and a few months later when the WHATWG started Apple had joined. I don't think Google's name was attached until Hixie moved to work there (admittedly not that much later).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

firecall 7y ago

Is WHATWG pronounceable?

louniks 7y ago
I instinctively read it as "what-wee-gee"
- hober 7y ago
  That is how a lot of us say it.
sjwright 7y ago
I always thought it to be "what wig".
daurnimator 7y ago
"What working group"
cjslep 7y ago
"What double you gee"
cwmma 7y ago
what-wig
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  I say "wot-wug", but then I've never actually had a spoken conversation about web-standards in over 20yrs of making websites (mostly non-commercially)
  - cwmma 7y ago
    depending on accent, those pronunciations can be pretty close
panic 7y ago

martin_a 7y ago

Maybe it's just me, but I've never heard about the WHATWG before. And for everybody like me, that acronym stands for "Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group".

skrebbel 7y ago
WHATWG is basically the browser vendors sidelining W3C to discuss what features HTML etc should have. The news today is that the W3C finally accepted that situation.
- coldtea 7y ago
  It's not like anybody of us voted for W3C either (so it's not like one body is the "legitimate" one and other is not). And the W3C had stalled progress so much in the 00s and 10s, that it deservedly got sidelined.
  - austincheney 7y ago
    They were focused on data organization and security instead of rounded corners or querySelectors, but most frontend developers saw that as stalling.
    - marcosdumay 7y ago
      They were focused on replacing web development practices. Something that was much needed, but completely uncalled for.
    - bzbarsky 7y ago
      As someone who was involved in some of the W3C work at the time, it's not clear to what extent they were focused on "security" at all.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      Neither data organization nor security is their role... One belongs to the backend to decide, the other is for HTTP/S-level specs and Javascript, none of which are or should be W3C's concern.

shumailakhan 7y ago

http://licensekeys.co/tuxera-ntfs-crack/ http://licensekeys.co/tuxera-ntfs-crack/

inglor 7y ago

In practice I've found that web standards are mostly driven by people who are willing to spend the time and effort to iron our all the edge cases. I've had a very pleasant experience contributing to things like `fetch` and negative experiences contributing to some other things - essentially it's a "people problem" more than a technology problem.

dillonmckay 7y ago
Isn’t that the case with most human committees?
kevingadd 7y ago
I find the pleasantness of the standards process depends on how many people have strong opinions about the thing you're working on. Being involved in 'new' standards like fetch or gamepad or webgl is generally pretty relaxed because while it's interesting to many people, there aren't a bunch of people with Past Experience with the new api/standard and they aren't about to dedicate a bunch of time to doing it themselves. Coming in to try and fix problems or propose improvements for existing stuff like canvas or XHR or whatever is another matter entirely, as you've probably noticed. Thanks for helping make fetch good!

jrochkind1 7y ago

On the one hand, good. On the other, it seems like just complete capitulation by the W3C; WHATWG makes all the real decisions still, W3C now performs important administrative services for free, turning the "living standard" into an actual usable standard, without actually having any meaningful power over the results. WHATWG gets to do the part that matters without having to do the hard part, W3C does the hard part for them without any control over what matters. On the other other hand, sometimes when the battle is already lost, formal capitulation is all that's left. The browser vendors took control of the web standards process from any body that might represent/balance multiple constituencies/interests, and that's just how it is now.

rimliu 7y ago
The browser vendors always had control. W3C could put anything they want into the standards, it does not matter if nobody implements it.
mcchampion 7y ago
W3C did try to balance multiple constituencies for HTML, but it couldn't find consensus among them, and broad consensus is the basis for its authority. WHATWG didn't so much take control of the standards process as recognize that what actually works on the web defines the "stadard" It's not a capitulation, it's a way to exert influence in a world that respects rough consensus and running code more than formal processes and authority. Under the agreement, W3C has the power to ratify (or not) changes to HTML/DOM that align with the needs of its broad community for accessibility, internationalization, privacy, security, etc. The agreement provides a way for experts in those "horizontal" areas to participate more effectively in WHATWG to get improvements made upstream, rather than downstream in what amounted to a fork. And yes, W3C provides the service of providing vetted snapshots of the Living Standards into more formal standards that governments and other standards bodies can reference and ratify. That's adding real value for some constituencies.
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  If they choose "not to ratify" something... will it have any effect on browser behavior at all? I don't think so. It'd just be a standard none of the relevant software cares about. Pretty useless to anyone. (Much like current W3C html standards...) Seems to me W3C will straight up be acting as administrative staff for WHATWG, providing free labor to do the "hard parts" of providing a useful standard, without much decision-making ability. Without much decision-making ability is indeed the status quo. Now they're providing some free labor too. But it's certainly less pointless than what they were doing before, so.

sonnyblarney 7y ago

The only thing that matters is what Chrome and iOS Safari decide to do. Sadly.

domenicd 7y ago

Folks may find the more-detailed blog post linked at https://www.w3.org/blog/2019/05/w3c-and-whatwg-to-work-together-to-advance-the-open-web-platform/ https://www.w3.org/blog/2019/05/w3c-and-whatwg-to-work-toget... to be more clear. Also, for the full details, here is a direct link to the agreement: https://www.w3.org/2019/04/WHATWG-W3C-MOU.html https://www.w3.org/2019/04/WHATWG-W3C-MOU.html

snek 7y ago

To clarify why WHATWG exists and why W3C lost power over the HTML spec: Around 2004 W3C abandoned organizational effort on HTML in favor of things like XHTML2, XEvents, semantic web, etc. The WHATWG was formed in reaction to that, rewriting HTML completely from its W3C HTML 4.0 version for example to make it better for web applications and to specify things in more detail. Since the formation of WHATWG, W3C HTML specs became copy-pastes (often not even correct copy-pastes) in an effort to satisfy paying member companies (https://github.com/w3c/charter-html/issues/14#issuecomment-108606731 https://github.com/w3c/charter-html/issues/14#issuecomment-1...). You can see everything WHATWG maintains here: https://platform.html5.org/ https://platform.html5.org/ (they are the green question mark) The W3C still maintains a good chunk web standards though, such as CSS, Wasm, web security, etc.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
austincheney 7y ago
That explains the HTML spec but not the DOM spec.
- olliej 7y ago
  The DOM is specified as part of the HTML spec. The whatwg HTML spec defines exactly how html is parsed, and exactly how every element interacts the scripting environment. Just defining the grammar is not sufficient. Historically for instance something like <bold>foo<italic>bar</bold>baz</italic> Produced a different DOM tree in different browsers. WHATWG specified what should actually happen. IIRC IE managed to produce a DOM graph rather than a tree in the above example.
  - austincheney 7y ago
    The DOM is a completely separate unrelated specification. https://dom.spec.whatwg.org https://dom.spec.whatwg.org
    - 7y ago

BinaryIdiot 7y ago

It's probably an unpopular opinion but I'm all for progress that may eventually lead to W3C's complete irrelevance. I've talked with folks at the WHATWG before, _Anyone_ can provide input and work with them. With the W3C it's, what, like $30k for the cheapest option and that barely gets you in the door. The W3C is too expensive to ever let small businesses or individuals have impact. I'd love to see more groups like the WHATWG specifically for this reason.

steveax 7y ago
Invited experts don’t pay any fees: https://www.w3.org/participate/invited-experts/ https://www.w3.org/participate/invited-experts/
- BinaryIdiot 7y ago
  I mean, I get that. But if you're a business or even an individual who was an interest in how the internet is being shaped you have to either pay a ton of money or somehow get them to invite you. WHATWG seems to have found a way to manage the noise of allowing essentially anyone in to comment and contribute.
frivoal 7y ago
There were serious issues with the way HTML was done at W3C, and this agreement between W3C and the WHATWG is a good thing. However, all W3C specs are developed in the open, nowadays on github, and feedback from anyone anywhere is taken seriously. Don't like something about css? go here: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues. Something wrong with SVG? https://github.com/w3c/svgwg/issues https://github.com/w3c/svgwg/issues. An issue with the Payment Handler API? https://w3c.github.io/payment-handler/ https://w3c.github.io/payment-handler/. Dislike the way W3C itself works? That's here: https://github.com/w3c/w3process https://github.com/w3c/w3process Yes, the W3C is a membership based organization, and if you want to vote for instance on who gets to be on its Advisory Board, or have a say in the Charter of Working Groups, you need to be a member, and pay. For the WHATWG, you don't get to vote on who's on the Steering Group, and you don't get a say on what new Workstreams are started / changed / stopped, even if you did want to pay. That's up to Google, Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla. Sure anybody can suggest stuff (but that's true at the W3C too), but they decide, and there's no way into that club. Not to claim that W3C is perfect. Plenty of improvements are needed. But claiming that small business or individuals cannot participate just isn't true.

xg15 7y ago

Out of couriosity, does the WHATWG have any commitment to keep the "review drafts" meaningful (e.g., by orienting the things that are actually supported by browsers along them)? Will it mean anything if one of them becomes a W3C Recommendation? If the W3C sends a draft back with requests for corrections, will anyone from WHATWG actually be motivated to make those corrections? Or is this more of a "pick any commit you like and we can declare it the 'review draft' if that makes you happy" kind of thing? Also, by this agreement, does the W3C have any avenues to influence HTML/DOM design work that exceed those of an average volunteer an the WHATWG mailing list?

DhanushDivara 7y ago

Good