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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

by 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.
  - ori_b 7y ago
    > 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. Ah, clearly that makes it easier for third parties to maintain browsers. Or, wait, no -- that's yet another way to push players that don't have hundreds of millions per year worth of funding. > Chrome mostly works better, follows specifications faster, and it is marketed better. That's largely because of the way the specs are developed: They rubber stamp Chrome features.
    - robocat 7y ago
      I'll bite: do you think that Chrome is some sort of conspiracy?? I also don't like how Firefox, Safari and Edge have failed to compete with it, especially because I don't like that Google slurps so much private information. I wish Opera could have continued to compete as I loved the underdog for years. If it were just a problem of marketing, I could be upset. However technically the Chrome team is just totally obliterating competitors by just being technically so much more competent and also providing features. Features that developers and consumers want: as a web developer I see Chrome kill the other browsers on metrics I care about such as bugs fixes, adding features that are relevant to my development, development tools, etc; As a Chrome user, Chrome mostly trounces the other browsers on security, speed, etc (Safari does win on some metrics on closed iOS and macOS). Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft are not poorly funded - they are just being beaten for what are mostly technical reasons (relatively slower, unreliability, wasting time on low-value features). On topic: Chrome implements many standards it didn't create far better than the other browsers. Browse through the list at https://wpt.fyi/results https://wpt.fyi/results and see that Chrome has better scores for IndexedDB (I think created by Firefox); better scores for offscreen-canvas and orientation-sensor (I think created by Apple). A great example: Firebug which was created outside[1] of Mozilla and fantastic at the time. Good developer tools draw in plenty of developers, and help make sure they test everything on your browser. Chrome Dev tools overtook it in every way I cared about: reliability, features, inbuilt F12, remote debugging, async stack, etc. Now developers use Chrome because this massive feature is so much better, and why blame the developers for using the tool that makes their job the easiest? PS: I didn't downvote you - someone else must have disliked the way you answered. [1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/saying-goodbye-to-firebug/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/saying-goodbye-to-firebug/

by panic 7y ago

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.
- ori_b 7y ago
  > 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. Ah, clearly that makes it easier for third parties to maintain browsers. Or, wait, no -- that's yet another way to push players that don't have hundreds of millions per year worth of funding. > Chrome mostly works better, follows specifications faster, and it is marketed better. That's largely because of the way the specs are developed: They rubber stamp Chrome features.
  - robocat 7y ago
    I'll bite: do you think that Chrome is some sort of conspiracy?? I also don't like how Firefox, Safari and Edge have failed to compete with it, especially because I don't like that Google slurps so much private information. I wish Opera could have continued to compete as I loved the underdog for years. If it were just a problem of marketing, I could be upset. However technically the Chrome team is just totally obliterating competitors by just being technically so much more competent and also providing features. Features that developers and consumers want: as a web developer I see Chrome kill the other browsers on metrics I care about such as bugs fixes, adding features that are relevant to my development, development tools, etc; As a Chrome user, Chrome mostly trounces the other browsers on security, speed, etc (Safari does win on some metrics on closed iOS and macOS). Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft are not poorly funded - they are just being beaten for what are mostly technical reasons (relatively slower, unreliability, wasting time on low-value features). On topic: Chrome implements many standards it didn't create far better than the other browsers. Browse through the list at https://wpt.fyi/results https://wpt.fyi/results and see that Chrome has better scores for IndexedDB (I think created by Firefox); better scores for offscreen-canvas and orientation-sensor (I think created by Apple). A great example: Firebug which was created outside[1] of Mozilla and fantastic at the time. Good developer tools draw in plenty of developers, and help make sure they test everything on your browser. Chrome Dev tools overtook it in every way I cared about: reliability, features, inbuilt F12, remote debugging, async stack, etc. Now developers use Chrome because this massive feature is so much better, and why blame the developers for using the tool that makes their job the easiest? PS: I didn't downvote you - someone else must have disliked the way you answered. [1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/saying-goodbye-to-firebug/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/saying-goodbye-to-firebug/