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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 Worki

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.
      - austincheney 7y ago
        I use all kinds of defined data structures in my JavaScript applications. Defining such as an interface is one TypeScripts biggest wins. W3C also owns XML and XML Schema which are all about defining data structures on the client side.
  - hungryfoolish 7y ago
    >It's not like anybody of us voted for W3C either You have more of a voice in the W3C than any other standards body (you can comment on the github issues, or join as an invited expert etc). The W3C was created by Tim Berners-Lee, if anyone should have a vote on how web standards are run, then the creator of the web should be one of the contenders for it. >And the W3C had stalled progress so much in the 00s and 10s Not the 10s, just the early part of 00s, due to the xhtml vs html5 thing.
    - gsnedders 7y ago
      > You have more of a voice in the W3C than any other standards body (you can comment on the github issues, or join as an invited expert etc). That's… not any different to the WHATWG. You can comment on GitHub issues there just fine too. (And you can't just join as an invited expert for the W3C, but even being an invited expert means relatively little in most groups.) > The W3C was created by Tim Berners-Lee, if anyone should have a vote on how web standards are run, then the creator of the web should be one of the contenders for it. Tim is scarcely involved in the W3C nowadays, and hasn't been for a long time. The fact he's in theory the Director (but in practice almost everything is done by W3C staff in the Director's name) means very, very little. That's an appeal to an authority who isn't even present.
      - hungryfoolish 7y ago
        >You can comment on GitHub issues there just fine too. Yes, but (and you can disagree with me here) the W3C has much better international participation and say in standards. I know you can just file github comments, but none of the world has any real way to oppose any development that the whatwg makers have proposed. There doesn't seem to be any consensus forming or way to really oppose any development apart from filing a github issue. All the editors are pretty much from one company, which feels like handing over control of the web to that one company essentially.
        domenicd 7y ago
        > All the editors are pretty much from one company, which feels like handing over control of the web to that one company essentially. Which company are you referring to? Per https://github.com/whatwg/sg/blob/master/Workstreams.md https://github.com/whatwg/sg/blob/master/Workstreams.md, I see - 3 independent (Dom Farolino, Robert Kowalski, G. P. Hemsley) - 2 Mozilla (Mike Taylor, Anne van Kesteren) - 2 Google (Domenic Denicola, Philip Jägenstedt) - 1 CloudFlare (Terrin Stock) - 1 Bocoup (Simon Pieters)
- martin_a 7y ago
  Yeah, I expected something like that. As the other comment mentions, I'm not sure whether to feel bad about this or not. On the one hand, browser manufacturers now "have won" and can do what they like. On the other hand, the W3C always was kind of a toothless tiger, hoping that everybody would do as they say. Difficult situation, not sure if this will "help the web".
  - hungryfoolish 7y ago
    >On the other hand, the W3C always was kind of a toothless tiger Not really, it was, and still is, a neutral ground for people to discuss and build consensus on what technical standards should be on the web. CSS, ARIA, WCAG and many other stuff are working in the W3C pretty well.
- panic 7y ago
  The biggest impact of WHATWG's work wasn't about features, but about defining HTML itself in a way that matched how web pages were written. Before HTML5, every browser parsed HTML in subtly incompatible ways. A document written for one browser could fail to render properly in another. Now, the process for converting bytes into a DOM tree is completely and precisely specified (https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#parsing https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#parsing), down to the level of sniffing text encodings and changing them mid-parse. It's hard to overstate how important this sort of compatibility work has been to the strength of the modern web.
  - ori_b 7y ago
    > It's hard to overstate how important this sort of compatibility work has been to the strength of the modern web. There are fewer compatible browsers than at any time in the past 20 years. The compatibility problem has been solved by drowning browser maintainers in complexity and convincing them to give up. All the small browsers lack the manpower to implement the rapidly churning spec. This leaves the Google-funded Firefox and the Google-funded Chromium in the space. Compatibility has been solved by reducing the web to a monoculture, with a puppet competitor to avoid monopoly issues.
    - robocat 7y ago
      I don't think that is a fair analysis. Firstly, much of the complexity is an emergent property of interaction between a spec and reality: the engineering choices developers make when implementing a spec. Pixel examples: (a) mitering of borders, (b) sizing four 25% width divs within a 99px div. Pick just about any old spec, then look at the corner cases where developers have discovered different browsers act differently ("bugs"). The programming differences are often emergent and are not covered by the spec. Developers create web pages that depend on the differences in a browser: that is a hard reality. Secondly: Chrome mostly works better, follows specifications faster, and it is marketed better. Firefox has a significant budget, but it tools around with a bunch of shit that doesn't make their browser better. My interactions with Mozilla trying to get real bugs fixed have been poor. Safari and Microsoft were worse. Chrome cares about bugs, and fixes them in my experience.
- domenicd 7y ago
  > WHATWG is basically the browser vendors sidelining W3C to discuss what features HTML etc should have. One way of looking at it is who has final say what ends up in the documents. That seems to be what you're discussing. In the W3C, that's the Director, Tim Berners-Lee. Except, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, he has delegated all his decision-making powers to W3C staff. So ultimately it is the W3C CEO and the folks he hires. In the WHATWG, that's the browser vendors (i.e., the WHATWG Steering Group). I find the WHATWG model to make more sense, as I think what ends up in specs should match what the implementers plan to do; that makes for a more useful spec ecosystem for everyone. When you diverge too far from that model, you get circa-20004 W3C, i.e. XHTML 2, XForms, XEvents, etc. A different way of looking at it is who contributes to the discussion and development of features. In the W3C, that's paying member companies (https://www.w3.org/Consortium/fees https://www.w3.org/Consortium/fees, $2.25-$77k/year in the US). Although anyone can comment on GitHub, to contribute ideas that get incorporated into the specification, you need to be a W3C member, for IPR reasons. (Or invited expert, but that has its own problems; see https://medium.com/@tobie/w3c-doesnt-help-its-invited-experts-it-should-2fb36ae9f720. https://medium.com/@tobie/w3c-doesnt-help-its-invited-expert...) In the WHATWG, anyone can contribute; the IPR concerns are taken care of by signing an agreement, somewhat like an open-source project CLA, but that agreement does not require paying membership fees. Overall, I think the WHATWG structure, of being open to input from all (instead of pay-to-play), with the spec tracking what browsers intend to implement (instead of tracking what W3C staff deems good), is a pretty great model for standardization.
  - hungryfoolish 7y ago
    >Overall, I think the WHATWG structure, of being open to input from all (instead of pay-to-play), Thats not entirely fair. The WHATWG is also pay-to-play in a way - the browser makers have disproportionally higher power, even more so than the w3c model where there is at least some form of consensus forming among a group of people with more international representation. Now technically anyone in the world can open a github issue (w3c also does it though now), but thats about what anyone can do to oppose something in the spec that the browser makers have their hearts set on.
    - 7y ago
scarcelycoher 7y ago
And it's pronounced more or less like "wat-woo-g"
- domenicd 7y ago
  https://whatwg.org/faq#spell-and-pronounce https://whatwg.org/faq#spell-and-pronounce
_bxg1 7y ago
Mentally I always read it as "What We Get"
ptgloden 7y ago
WHATWG also stands for "What working group", as in "What working group is going to work on extending HTML" http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1086387609 http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1086387609

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.
    - austincheney 7y ago
      I use all kinds of defined data structures in my JavaScript applications. Defining such as an interface is one TypeScripts biggest wins. W3C also owns XML and XML Schema which are all about defining data structures on the client side.
- hungryfoolish 7y ago
  >It's not like anybody of us voted for W3C either You have more of a voice in the W3C than any other standards body (you can comment on the github issues, or join as an invited expert etc). The W3C was created by Tim Berners-Lee, if anyone should have a vote on how web standards are run, then the creator of the web should be one of the contenders for it. >And the W3C had stalled progress so much in the 00s and 10s Not the 10s, just the early part of 00s, due to the xhtml vs html5 thing.
  - gsnedders 7y ago
    > You have more of a voice in the W3C than any other standards body (you can comment on the github issues, or join as an invited expert etc). That's… not any different to the WHATWG. You can comment on GitHub issues there just fine too. (And you can't just join as an invited expert for the W3C, but even being an invited expert means relatively little in most groups.) > The W3C was created by Tim Berners-Lee, if anyone should have a vote on how web standards are run, then the creator of the web should be one of the contenders for it. Tim is scarcely involved in the W3C nowadays, and hasn't been for a long time. The fact he's in theory the Director (but in practice almost everything is done by W3C staff in the Director's name) means very, very little. That's an appeal to an authority who isn't even present.
    - hungryfoolish 7y ago
      >You can comment on GitHub issues there just fine too. Yes, but (and you can disagree with me here) the W3C has much better international participation and say in standards. I know you can just file github comments, but none of the world has any real way to oppose any development that the whatwg makers have proposed. There doesn't seem to be any consensus forming or way to really oppose any development apart from filing a github issue. All the editors are pretty much from one company, which feels like handing over control of the web to that one company essentially.
      - domenicd 7y ago
        > All the editors are pretty much from one company, which feels like handing over control of the web to that one company essentially. Which company are you referring to? Per https://github.com/whatwg/sg/blob/master/Workstreams.md https://github.com/whatwg/sg/blob/master/Workstreams.md, I see - 3 independent (Dom Farolino, Robert Kowalski, G. P. Hemsley) - 2 Mozilla (Mike Taylor, Anne van Kesteren) - 2 Google (Domenic Denicola, Philip Jägenstedt) - 1 CloudFlare (Terrin Stock) - 1 Bocoup (Simon Pieters)
martin_a 7y ago
Yeah, I expected something like that. As the other comment mentions, I'm not sure whether to feel bad about this or not. On the one hand, browser manufacturers now "have won" and can do what they like. On the other hand, the W3C always was kind of a toothless tiger, hoping that everybody would do as they say. Difficult situation, not sure if this will "help the web".
- hungryfoolish 7y ago
  >On the other hand, the W3C always was kind of a toothless tiger Not really, it was, and still is, a neutral ground for people to discuss and build consensus on what technical standards should be on the web. CSS, ARIA, WCAG and many other stuff are working in the W3C pretty well.
panic 7y ago
The biggest impact of WHATWG's work wasn't about features, but about defining HTML itself in a way that matched how web pages were written. Before HTML5, every browser parsed HTML in subtly incompatible ways. A document written for one browser could fail to render properly in another. Now, the process for converting bytes into a DOM tree is completely and precisely specified (https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#parsing https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#parsing), down to the level of sniffing text encodings and changing them mid-parse. It's hard to overstate how important this sort of compatibility work has been to the strength of the modern web.
- ori_b 7y ago
  > It's hard to overstate how important this sort of compatibility work has been to the strength of the modern web. There are fewer compatible browsers than at any time in the past 20 years. The compatibility problem has been solved by drowning browser maintainers in complexity and convincing them to give up. All the small browsers lack the manpower to implement the rapidly churning spec. This leaves the Google-funded Firefox and the Google-funded Chromium in the space. Compatibility has been solved by reducing the web to a monoculture, with a puppet competitor to avoid monopoly issues.
  - robocat 7y ago
    I don't think that is a fair analysis. Firstly, much of the complexity is an emergent property of interaction between a spec and reality: the engineering choices developers make when implementing a spec. Pixel examples: (a) mitering of borders, (b) sizing four 25% width divs within a 99px div. Pick just about any old spec, then look at the corner cases where developers have discovered different browsers act differently ("bugs"). The programming differences are often emergent and are not covered by the spec. Developers create web pages that depend on the differences in a browser: that is a hard reality. Secondly: Chrome mostly works better, follows specifications faster, and it is marketed better. Firefox has a significant budget, but it tools around with a bunch of shit that doesn't make their browser better. My interactions with Mozilla trying to get real bugs fixed have been poor. Safari and Microsoft were worse. Chrome cares about bugs, and fixes them in my experience.
domenicd 7y ago
> WHATWG is basically the browser vendors sidelining W3C to discuss what features HTML etc should have. One way of looking at it is who has final say what ends up in the documents. That seems to be what you're discussing. In the W3C, that's the Director, Tim Berners-Lee. Except, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, he has delegated all his decision-making powers to W3C staff. So ultimately it is the W3C CEO and the folks he hires. In the WHATWG, that's the browser vendors (i.e., the WHATWG Steering Group). I find the WHATWG model to make more sense, as I think what ends up in specs should match what the implementers plan to do; that makes for a more useful spec ecosystem for everyone. When you diverge too far from that model, you get circa-20004 W3C, i.e. XHTML 2, XForms, XEvents, etc. A different way of looking at it is who contributes to the discussion and development of features. In the W3C, that's paying member companies (https://www.w3.org/Consortium/fees https://www.w3.org/Consortium/fees, $2.25-$77k/year in the US). Although anyone can comment on GitHub, to contribute ideas that get incorporated into the specification, you need to be a W3C member, for IPR reasons. (Or invited expert, but that has its own problems; see https://medium.com/@tobie/w3c-doesnt-help-its-invited-experts-it-should-2fb36ae9f720. https://medium.com/@tobie/w3c-doesnt-help-its-invited-expert...) In the WHATWG, anyone can contribute; the IPR concerns are taken care of by signing an agreement, somewhat like an open-source project CLA, but that agreement does not require paying membership fees. Overall, I think the WHATWG structure, of being open to input from all (instead of pay-to-play), with the spec tracking what browsers intend to implement (instead of tracking what W3C staff deems good), is a pretty great model for standardization.
- hungryfoolish 7y ago
  >Overall, I think the WHATWG structure, of being open to input from all (instead of pay-to-play), Thats not entirely fair. The WHATWG is also pay-to-play in a way - the browser makers have disproportionally higher power, even more so than the w3c model where there is at least some form of consensus forming among a group of people with more international representation. Now technically anyone in the world can open a github issue (w3c also does it though now), but thats about what anyone can do to oppose something in the spec that the browser makers have their hearts set on.
  - 7y ago

scarcelycoher 7y ago

And it's pronounced more or less like "wat-woo-g"

domenicd 7y ago
https://whatwg.org/faq#spell-and-pronounce https://whatwg.org/faq#spell-and-pronounce

_bxg1 7y ago

Mentally I always read it as "What We Get"

ptgloden 7y ago

WHATWG also stands for "What working group", as in "What working group is going to work on extending HTML" http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1086387609 http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1086387609