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The narrative that "HTML5 looked at what browsers do, rather than following ivory tower SGML" is simply a myth and not backed up by facts. Ian Hickson introduce

The narrative that "HTML5 looked at what browsers do, rather than following ivory tower SGML" is simply a myth and not backed up by facts. Ian Hickson introduced sectioning elements, the whole flawed outlining algorithm idea, and the aside element (presumably to make it easier to tell ads from content for Google's crawler), with lots of controversities at the time. The HTML spec is also chock full of inconsistencies of that time and mindset (for example, the allowed characters in ID attributes or general lexical rules for elements not matching CSS selectors' idea of an ID or element name) not actually supported by any browser. Please don't tell me SGML comments were the problem - SGML commenting syntax is straightforward, eg. anything in double-hyphens within a markup declaration is treated as a comment, and there can be multiple comments in a markup declaration (unlike XML). The only problem I see is that there is an interaction with an ancient form of JavaScript comment taking the form of double-hyphens, presumably to make JavaScript commenting uniform with HTML syntax. Now the rules for terminating the content of a script element are dangerously bogus in ancient HTML, but HTML5 has done nothing to fix the situation. In any case, WHATWG has driven almost all web browsers out of existence already; appealing to what "browser vendors" (Google) actually do is not the solution, but part of the problem, obviously.

om2 7y ago
The HTML parsing algorithm looked at what browsers do. WHATWG HTML also included other innovations, some of which didn’t entirely work out. Nowadays, new additions are not added so loosely and there is a better defined working mode and governance policy.
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  "Government policy" yeah right. Chrome implements stuff, and Moz has to follow suit; then it gets prescribed in WHATWG's spec. OTOH, stuff introduced by Moz that Chrome doesn't implement gets removed from the spec. Such as much needed new elements for basic declarative UIs (menu, menuitem) to fight over-reliance on JavaScript and CSS hacks, introduced by FF but boycotted by Chrome. As was part of the WHATWG snapshot on which W3C HTML 5.1 was based, and removed in W3C HTML 5.2. There's no evidence Hixie analyzed "what browsers were doing". There is, however, evidence that Hixie just made up new elements as he saw fit [1]. [1]: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/the-harsh-truth-about-html5s-structural-semantics-part-1/ https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/the-harsh-truth-about-...
bzbarsky 7y ago
I'm not saying HTML5 didn't have its share of architecture astronauting, attempts to add features that didn't pan out, etc. Trust me, I know it did. I'm not saying it didn't spec various things that didn't match browsers (some just because, some because it tried to reverse-engineer browsers and failed). Well do I know it did; we're still sorting some of those things out. The only defense there is that unlike previous web specs it actually tried to specify this stuff (like navigation!) instead of just saying "yeah, do whatever". The element name thing was actually needed for compat with how browsers parsed HTML in practice. The ID thing largely affects well-formedness, but was also informed by common practices, and the mismatch with CSS in large part was probably somewhat unavoidable due to differences in reserved chars. For example, there's really no reason, within the context of HTML, to not allow "foo.bar" as an ID, and people were definitely using IDs of this form all over, whereas in CSS you'd need to jump through the "#foo\.bar" hoop to use it in a selector. SGML comments were definitely _a_ big problem (I'm not sure why you decided to describe them as "the" problem). This sort of markup:  This is still comment, because the '>' is inside the comment the third double-dashes started, yes? was fairly common: people like to use "--" as a replacement for em-dash and it often ends up in the middle of comments. Browsers that attempted to implement SGML comment parsing would end up with the "This is still comment text commented out; other browsers did not. > presumably to make JavaScript commenting uniform with HTML syntax No, that was there to enable hiding of <script> tag contents from browsers that didn't know about <script> at all. So you would write: <script>  </script> and in a non-script-aware browser you wouldn't have a blob of script text showing up... It's actually a pretty sane approach for the problem of initially introducing the <script> element in a world where it didn't use to exist. > In any case, WHATWG has driven almost all web browsers out of existence already I'm not sure the problem here is "WHATWG" per se. I'm pretty sure that if WHATWG had never existed the results would have been pretty similar...

om2 7y ago

The HTML parsing algorithm looked at what browsers do. WHATWG HTML also included other innovations, some of which didn’t entirely work out. Nowadays, new additions are not added so loosely and there is a better defined working mode and governance policy.

tannhaeuser 7y ago
"Government policy" yeah right. Chrome implements stuff, and Moz has to follow suit; then it gets prescribed in WHATWG's spec. OTOH, stuff introduced by Moz that Chrome doesn't implement gets removed from the spec. Such as much needed new elements for basic declarative UIs (menu, menuitem) to fight over-reliance on JavaScript and CSS hacks, introduced by FF but boycotted by Chrome. As was part of the WHATWG snapshot on which W3C HTML 5.1 was based, and removed in W3C HTML 5.2. There's no evidence Hixie analyzed "what browsers were doing". There is, however, evidence that Hixie just made up new elements as he saw fit [1]. [1]: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/the-harsh-truth-about-html5s-structural-semantics-part-1/ https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/the-harsh-truth-about-...

bzbarsky 7y ago

I'm not saying HTML5 didn't have its share of architecture astronauting, attempts to add features that didn't pan out, etc. Trust me, I know it did. I'm not saying it didn't spec various things that didn't match browsers (some just because, some because it tried to reverse-engineer browsers and failed). Well do I know it did; we're still sorting some of those things out. The only defense there is that unlike previous web specs it actually tried to specify this stuff (like navigation!) instead of just saying "yeah, do whatever". The element name thing was actually needed for compat with how browsers parsed HTML in practice. The ID thing largely affects well-formedness, but was also informed by common practices, and the mismatch with CSS in large part was probably somewhat unavoidable due to differences in reserved chars. For example, there's really no reason, within the context of HTML, to not allow "foo.bar" as an ID, and people were definitely using IDs of this form all over, whereas in CSS you'd need to jump through the "#foo\.bar" hoop to use it in a selector. SGML comments were definitely _a_ big problem (I'm not sure why you decided to describe them as "the" problem). This sort of markup:  This is still comment, because the '>' is inside the comment the third double-dashes started, yes? was fairly common: people like to use "--" as a replacement for em-dash and it often ends up in the middle of comments. Browsers that attempted to implement SGML comment parsing would end up with the "This is still comment text commented out; other browsers did not. > presumably to make JavaScript commenting uniform with HTML syntax No, that was there to enable hiding of <script> tag contents from browsers that didn't know about <script> at all. So you would write: <script>  </script> and in a non-script-aware browser you wouldn't have a blob of script text showing up... It's actually a pretty sane approach for the problem of initially introducing the <script> element in a world where it didn't use to exist. > In any case, WHATWG has driven almost all web browsers out of existence already I'm not sure the problem here is "WHATWG" per se. I'm pretty sure that if WHATWG had never existed the results would have been pretty similar...