8 ms·

The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world

57 points by sendilkumarn 5y ago

gmfawcett 5y ago
What is the relationship between W3C and WHATWG these days? I haven't been following that story for years now -- at the time it seemed that W3C was losing relevance, and that WHATWG was becoming the de facto standards keeper for web tech.
- assemblylang 5y ago
  >What is the relationship between W3C and WHATWG these days? IIRC a few years ago W3C essentially handed over web standards to WHATWG, with the thinking being that it wasn't helpful to have 2 competing standards.
  - rpastuszak 5y ago
    Since the web standards are owned by WHATWG, any idea what the purpose of W3C is nowadays?
    - pdw 5y ago
      XML and everything that's build on it
    - ryukafalz 5y ago
      I know they do standards work on top of web protocols these days. Those digital vaccination records were based on W3C’s Verifiable Credentials standard. (The US ones anyway; I’m not sure about those used elsewhere in the world.)
    - Macha 5y ago
      CSS, XML, SVG are still W3C standards
    - doublerabbit 5y ago
      Somehow I've not herd of WHATWG and according to the wiki article the active memberships are: Apple, Google, Microsoft and supposedly Mozilla? The three largest tech companies own the internet standards? That's quite unsettling.
      - mminer237 5y ago
        Regardless of who participates in drafting standards, those five control the de facto standards anyway as they make the five largest browsers.
      - JeremyBanks 5y ago
  - robin_reala 5y ago
    Just HTML, not anything else.
    - Macha 5y ago
      Note however that HTTP is a IETF standard, Javascript is an ECMA standard, so of the core web components, CSS is the last they control.
      - frivoal 5y ago
        Depending on what you consider core: also SVG, WebRTC, ServiceWorkers, Aria, Web Payments, WOFF, Web Audio…
      - robin_reala 5y ago
        Right, but that’s not the only thing they do that’s used on the web. They also own and run XML, security specs like CSP and SRI, the WCAG accessibility guidelines, Web Payments, WebAuth, WebRTC, etc etc. They also do non-web stuff that happens to use web standards, for example ePub3.
  - tannhaeuser 5y ago
    W3C had released redacted snapshots (HTML 5, 5.1, and 5.2) of WHATWG's so-called "living standard", then published HTML 5.3 as a reference to a specific WHATWG commit and for a short time promised more supposedly at least qa'd snapshots, then last year finally gave up and just linked to WHATWG's head [1]. SVG2 didn't go anywhere either due to lack of interest of "browser vendors". MathML hasn't been updated in many years AFAIK. So that leaves ARIA and CSS. Whatever W3C does and with due respect to TBL, as a self-proclaimed standardization body they've failed spectacularly to keep "browsers vendors" at bay and the web from being monopolized, and I think they should disband, if only to demonstrate to the world that the web isn't "standardized" in any meaningful sense of that word. Even HNers frequently have illusions about "web standards". While on the way out, they might attempt to deliver CSS specs actually useful for developing browsers. Or maybe they want to venture into developing a browser themselves using their funds? [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/2021/NOTE-html53-20210128/ https://www.w3.org/TR/2021/NOTE-html53-20210128/
- user3939382 5y ago
  There's a very interesting long-form (somewhat chronologically organized) answer to your question from the horse's mouth here https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/W3C https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/W3C
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Seems their mediawiki is struggling, here's an archive https://web.archive.org/web/20210815185631/https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/W3C https://web.archive.org/web/20210815185631/https://wiki.what...
zozbot234 5y ago
The W3C has endangered long-term resilience on the Web by supporting misguided efforts like EME, which aim to add a requirement for de-facto proprietary "plugins" to the open Web platform. Why should they deserve our support?
- Spivak 5y ago
  The W3C has no control over whether browsers implement support for DRM, they just wrote a document that says if you do the API should look like this. It was going to happen regardless. The actual argument is that the W3C has absolutely zero teeth because they couldn’t stop EME even if they wanted to and therefore are irrelevant compared to WHATWG.
  - pornel 5y ago
    There's more to it. The EME API is useless without the undocumented proprietary plug-in side (called CDM in the spec). It has no technical purpose. It's only to "standards-wash" an entirely closed DRM by Google (and everyone else's proprietary DRMs). The spec contains diagrams and descriptions that have been acknowledged by its authors to be factually incorrect. EME pretends to be an in-browser thing, rather than hardware+kernel "hard" DRM. The spec proponents stated that they'll never use the scheme in the spec, and the "hard" DRM is the key feature they're after. There have been a lot of process shenanigans: e.g. during likely the biggest disagreement in the history of W3C, the chair of the HTML WG announced that there is a consensus in the group about EME, and it can proceed further. Then the EME part has been moved out of public HTML WG to a closed-doors group. So it wasn't merely Google+Netflix saying "we'll do it anyway". It was a subversion and corruption of the W3C itself.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      "Standards-wash" is such an odd phrase. If I need to build an HTML parser in a world with proprietary CDM, I sure as hell prefer that CDM to declare itself in a standardized way than to have my parser need to handle non-standardized content declarations. Having a standard benefits even user agents that don't plan to support the feature.
0des 5y ago
W3C wew. Where do we even start? Let's begin with a polite thank you for your service, a hot drink, maybe some type of certificate of acknowledgment that says like "you were present." and then call it day. But beyond that, in my opinion, W3C has been a disaster since day 1. It seems like some people with good intentions decided one day they could just play RFC roulette and maybe if they slipped enough nonsense into their content that nobody would notice, and we would just all play along and build the misshapen web they were imagining.
- amelius 5y ago
  Main problem is that the web is amassing complexity everyday, without ever shedding any of it.
  - 0des 5y ago
    So? Everything in life is like this. Yesterday will always be easier than tomorrow.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Point is that you have to be incredibly careful about allowing new complexity. Now we have reached the situation that implementing a new browser has become possible only for very large companies. This would not have been necessary if the web was built using a more layered approach.
      - 0des 5y ago
        > you have to be incredibly careful about allowing new complexity Right, this is my point, the W3C just seems to make it up as they go along and pick and choose.
    - tannhaeuser 5y ago
      That's too reductionist. There's value in having a media-player-like app of limited complexity and purpose, with a wealth of server-side platforms to deliver content.
toyg 5y ago
- netsharc 5y ago
  IIRC strictly speaking the "pandemic" started when the disease became a global thing: https://time.com/5791661/who-coronavirus-pandemic-declaration/ https://time.com/5791661/who-coronavirus-pandemic-declaratio...
  - toyg 5y ago
    Yeah, March 11. Not 21.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  Just trying to read the article I was rejected from 3 IP addresses by their junk-yard dog "Wordfence". And I didn't like the overly upbeat tone of it. So yes, the statement seems full of parochial self-congratulation for those "in the club". Please, the "ultimate tool of resilience" was mRNA and the extraordinary efforts of biologists. It was hospital staff who died working 18 hour days without PPE. This narrative that "technology saved us" in the pandemic is cute, but also puff and bluster. We're still dealing with the equal and opposite effect of web technologies in spreading anti-vac messages and conspiracy theory. The winners were Google and Amazon. Not "the web". The paragraph "A web for everyone" pays lip service to acknowledging that "an estimated 37 percent of the world’s population lacks web access". Yet effectively shrugging responsibility for stewardship onto Google, a for-profit company bent on eliminating privacy and dignity online, isn't a good look for W3C. It hides another reality, the one in which the pandemic showed our normative reliance on Web technology is itself a form of irresilience. Our world is precarious in the absence of other parallel and supporting technologies, of offline, radio, good public transport, functional (healthy not overcrowded) physical community spaces, reliable mail service, stable electricity supply and much more. There's a reality in which some people with unequal access to digital technology suffered more than if other social measures had been taken. Those with older phones and computers, the wrong browser, not enough money for bandwidth and those in rural areas were all marginalised. Those who value privacy and don't wish to lay their lives at the feet of a few giant tech corporations. The "Web saved us from the pandemic" story makes it easier and more acceptable to exclude marginal groups within our own society.
gambler 5y ago
"A web for everyone" turned out to be a lie. The web architecture made it trivial to manipulate information and cancel people. Nothing in the protocols deals with archiving or true redundancy. Nothing deals with DDoS or bypassing censorship. The architecture itself encourages centralization. Moreover, the protocols are currently being manipulated to encourage even more central control. We're way past the point where expressing sentiments like "this is for everyone" is aspirational. Right now it's merely out of touch and tone-deaf.
- phailhaus 5y ago
  Are you complaining that there is no way to "bypass censorship" on Facebook? Because it is pretty trivial to host your own site. The web has absolutely delivered on that promise; just see how the efforts to shut down The Pirate Bay have failed.
- openfuture 5y ago
  Yeah what you are running into is the difference between the web, which is already dead and rotting, versus the internet, which is quite resilient and is in the process of eating the web.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > bypassing censorship Back in the early days, people used to say "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". That may have even been true back then. Definitely not true any more, at least not of the internet as we know it.
  - Ajedi32 5y ago
    It's still true, for the internet at least; the problem is that the other layers we've since built on top of the internet (large, centralized web services) do not share that virtue.
jddil 5y ago
This is going to come off as glib but the W3C has no relevance anymore, it exists to give the WHATWG the stamp of approval on it's RFCs. It's like the grandfather you give deference to but hasn't been relevant in years. They may still "control" css and xml (not sure the exhaustive list) but I don't understand why those haven't been moved to WHATWG as well.
323 5y ago
W3C is irrelevant these days. The "Web" is what Google decides it to be - what new APIs to add to Chrome, what protocols to use (HTTP/2, HTTP/3) to access it.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  That's what they used to say about Microsoft. Large players come and go. Chrome is at the head now because MS rested on their laurels and IE's performance rotted enough for a new player to take them on in market-share.
  - ygra 5y ago
    I don't particularly see a new large player come in the browser space, though. Creating a browser from scratch is a huge untertaking and the fact that everyone except Google, Mozilla, and Apply have given up is testament to that. Edge (Legacy) was a decent browser, but keeping up even with still missing Web APIs proved too expensive (alongside fixing bugs). Safari may be in the same pickle these days with apparently a sizeable backlog of missing features and incompatible implementations. Granted, that may also be due to many developers assuming Chrome to be a reference implementation. If a new player comes along I'd guess it will be based on Blink, but they would probably need more resources than Google can throw at Chrome. And a way to finance them ... there's probably too few people willing to pay for a browser these days.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      The point is that Google is managing their dominance properly, only really held off from >90% dominance by Apple's WebKit rule for iOS App Store apps.
      - 323 5y ago
        You mean like disabling important functionality required by uBlock and other ad-blockers? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-still-hurts-privacy-security-innovation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-st...
zanethomas 5y ago
"As we reflect on the past two years of altered life amid the pandemic, the importance of the web and all it enables has been on high display. " Including all the censorship enabled.

57 points by sendilkumarn 5y ago

What is the relationship between W3C and WHATWG these days? I haven't been following that story for years now -- at the time it seemed that W3C was losing relevance, and that WHATWG was becoming the de facto standards keeper for web tech.

assemblylang 5y ago
>What is the relationship between W3C and WHATWG these days? IIRC a few years ago W3C essentially handed over web standards to WHATWG, with the thinking being that it wasn't helpful to have 2 competing standards.
- rpastuszak 5y ago
  Since the web standards are owned by WHATWG, any idea what the purpose of W3C is nowadays?
  - pdw 5y ago
    XML and everything that's build on it
  - ryukafalz 5y ago
    I know they do standards work on top of web protocols these days. Those digital vaccination records were based on W3C’s Verifiable Credentials standard. (The US ones anyway; I’m not sure about those used elsewhere in the world.)
  - Macha 5y ago
    CSS, XML, SVG are still W3C standards
  - doublerabbit 5y ago
    Somehow I've not herd of WHATWG and according to the wiki article the active memberships are: Apple, Google, Microsoft and supposedly Mozilla? The three largest tech companies own the internet standards? That's quite unsettling.
    - mminer237 5y ago
      Regardless of who participates in drafting standards, those five control the de facto standards anyway as they make the five largest browsers.
    - JeremyBanks 5y ago
- robin_reala 5y ago
  Just HTML, not anything else.
  - Macha 5y ago
    Note however that HTTP is a IETF standard, Javascript is an ECMA standard, so of the core web components, CSS is the last they control.
    - frivoal 5y ago
      Depending on what you consider core: also SVG, WebRTC, ServiceWorkers, Aria, Web Payments, WOFF, Web Audio…
    - robin_reala 5y ago
      Right, but that’s not the only thing they do that’s used on the web. They also own and run XML, security specs like CSP and SRI, the WCAG accessibility guidelines, Web Payments, WebAuth, WebRTC, etc etc. They also do non-web stuff that happens to use web standards, for example ePub3.
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  W3C had released redacted snapshots (HTML 5, 5.1, and 5.2) of WHATWG's so-called "living standard", then published HTML 5.3 as a reference to a specific WHATWG commit and for a short time promised more supposedly at least qa'd snapshots, then last year finally gave up and just linked to WHATWG's head [1]. SVG2 didn't go anywhere either due to lack of interest of "browser vendors". MathML hasn't been updated in many years AFAIK. So that leaves ARIA and CSS. Whatever W3C does and with due respect to TBL, as a self-proclaimed standardization body they've failed spectacularly to keep "browsers vendors" at bay and the web from being monopolized, and I think they should disband, if only to demonstrate to the world that the web isn't "standardized" in any meaningful sense of that word. Even HNers frequently have illusions about "web standards". While on the way out, they might attempt to deliver CSS specs actually useful for developing browsers. Or maybe they want to venture into developing a browser themselves using their funds? [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/2021/NOTE-html53-20210128/ https://www.w3.org/TR/2021/NOTE-html53-20210128/
user3939382 5y ago
There's a very interesting long-form (somewhat chronologically organized) answer to your question from the horse's mouth here https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/W3C https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/W3C
- judge2020 5y ago
  Seems their mediawiki is struggling, here's an archive https://web.archive.org/web/20210815185631/https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/W3C https://web.archive.org/web/20210815185631/https://wiki.what...

zozbot234 5y ago

The W3C has endangered long-term resilience on the Web by supporting misguided efforts like EME, which aim to add a requirement for de-facto proprietary "plugins" to the open Web platform. Why should they deserve our support?

Spivak 5y ago
The W3C has no control over whether browsers implement support for DRM, they just wrote a document that says if you do the API should look like this. It was going to happen regardless. The actual argument is that the W3C has absolutely zero teeth because they couldn’t stop EME even if they wanted to and therefore are irrelevant compared to WHATWG.
- pornel 5y ago
  There's more to it. The EME API is useless without the undocumented proprietary plug-in side (called CDM in the spec). It has no technical purpose. It's only to "standards-wash" an entirely closed DRM by Google (and everyone else's proprietary DRMs). The spec contains diagrams and descriptions that have been acknowledged by its authors to be factually incorrect. EME pretends to be an in-browser thing, rather than hardware+kernel "hard" DRM. The spec proponents stated that they'll never use the scheme in the spec, and the "hard" DRM is the key feature they're after. There have been a lot of process shenanigans: e.g. during likely the biggest disagreement in the history of W3C, the chair of the HTML WG announced that there is a consensus in the group about EME, and it can proceed further. Then the EME part has been moved out of public HTML WG to a closed-doors group. So it wasn't merely Google+Netflix saying "we'll do it anyway". It was a subversion and corruption of the W3C itself.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    "Standards-wash" is such an odd phrase. If I need to build an HTML parser in a world with proprietary CDM, I sure as hell prefer that CDM to declare itself in a standardized way than to have my parser need to handle non-standardized content declarations. Having a standard benefits even user agents that don't plan to support the feature.

0des 5y ago

W3C wew. Where do we even start? Let's begin with a polite thank you for your service, a hot drink, maybe some type of certificate of acknowledgment that says like "you were present." and then call it day. But beyond that, in my opinion, W3C has been a disaster since day 1. It seems like some people with good intentions decided one day they could just play RFC roulette and maybe if they slipped enough nonsense into their content that nobody would notice, and we would just all play along and build the misshapen web they were imagining.

amelius 5y ago
Main problem is that the web is amassing complexity everyday, without ever shedding any of it.
- 0des 5y ago
  So? Everything in life is like this. Yesterday will always be easier than tomorrow.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Point is that you have to be incredibly careful about allowing new complexity. Now we have reached the situation that implementing a new browser has become possible only for very large companies. This would not have been necessary if the web was built using a more layered approach.
    - 0des 5y ago
      > you have to be incredibly careful about allowing new complexity Right, this is my point, the W3C just seems to make it up as they go along and pick and choose.
  - tannhaeuser 5y ago
    That's too reductionist. There's value in having a media-player-like app of limited complexity and purpose, with a wealth of server-side platforms to deliver content.

toyg 5y ago

netsharc 5y ago
IIRC strictly speaking the "pandemic" started when the disease became a global thing: https://time.com/5791661/who-coronavirus-pandemic-declaration/ https://time.com/5791661/who-coronavirus-pandemic-declaratio...
- toyg 5y ago
  Yeah, March 11. Not 21.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
Just trying to read the article I was rejected from 3 IP addresses by their junk-yard dog "Wordfence". And I didn't like the overly upbeat tone of it. So yes, the statement seems full of parochial self-congratulation for those "in the club". Please, the "ultimate tool of resilience" was mRNA and the extraordinary efforts of biologists. It was hospital staff who died working 18 hour days without PPE. This narrative that "technology saved us" in the pandemic is cute, but also puff and bluster. We're still dealing with the equal and opposite effect of web technologies in spreading anti-vac messages and conspiracy theory. The winners were Google and Amazon. Not "the web". The paragraph "A web for everyone" pays lip service to acknowledging that "an estimated 37 percent of the world’s population lacks web access". Yet effectively shrugging responsibility for stewardship onto Google, a for-profit company bent on eliminating privacy and dignity online, isn't a good look for W3C. It hides another reality, the one in which the pandemic showed our normative reliance on Web technology is itself a form of irresilience. Our world is precarious in the absence of other parallel and supporting technologies, of offline, radio, good public transport, functional (healthy not overcrowded) physical community spaces, reliable mail service, stable electricity supply and much more. There's a reality in which some people with unequal access to digital technology suffered more than if other social measures had been taken. Those with older phones and computers, the wrong browser, not enough money for bandwidth and those in rural areas were all marginalised. Those who value privacy and don't wish to lay their lives at the feet of a few giant tech corporations. The "Web saved us from the pandemic" story makes it easier and more acceptable to exclude marginal groups within our own society.

gambler 5y ago

"A web for everyone" turned out to be a lie. The web architecture made it trivial to manipulate information and cancel people. Nothing in the protocols deals with archiving or true redundancy. Nothing deals with DDoS or bypassing censorship. The architecture itself encourages centralization. Moreover, the protocols are currently being manipulated to encourage even more central control. We're way past the point where expressing sentiments like "this is for everyone" is aspirational. Right now it's merely out of touch and tone-deaf.

phailhaus 5y ago
Are you complaining that there is no way to "bypass censorship" on Facebook? Because it is pretty trivial to host your own site. The web has absolutely delivered on that promise; just see how the efforts to shut down The Pirate Bay have failed.
openfuture 5y ago
Yeah what you are running into is the difference between the web, which is already dead and rotting, versus the internet, which is quite resilient and is in the process of eating the web.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> bypassing censorship Back in the early days, people used to say "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". That may have even been true back then. Definitely not true any more, at least not of the internet as we know it.
- Ajedi32 5y ago
  It's still true, for the internet at least; the problem is that the other layers we've since built on top of the internet (large, centralized web services) do not share that virtue.

jddil 5y ago

This is going to come off as glib but the W3C has no relevance anymore, it exists to give the WHATWG the stamp of approval on it's RFCs. It's like the grandfather you give deference to but hasn't been relevant in years. They may still "control" css and xml (not sure the exhaustive list) but I don't understand why those haven't been moved to WHATWG as well.

323 5y ago

W3C is irrelevant these days. The "Web" is what Google decides it to be - what new APIs to add to Chrome, what protocols to use (HTTP/2, HTTP/3) to access it.

shadowgovt 5y ago
That's what they used to say about Microsoft. Large players come and go. Chrome is at the head now because MS rested on their laurels and IE's performance rotted enough for a new player to take them on in market-share.
- ygra 5y ago
  I don't particularly see a new large player come in the browser space, though. Creating a browser from scratch is a huge untertaking and the fact that everyone except Google, Mozilla, and Apply have given up is testament to that. Edge (Legacy) was a decent browser, but keeping up even with still missing Web APIs proved too expensive (alongside fixing bugs). Safari may be in the same pickle these days with apparently a sizeable backlog of missing features and incompatible implementations. Granted, that may also be due to many developers assuming Chrome to be a reference implementation. If a new player comes along I'd guess it will be based on Blink, but they would probably need more resources than Google can throw at Chrome. And a way to finance them ... there's probably too few people willing to pay for a browser these days.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    The point is that Google is managing their dominance properly, only really held off from >90% dominance by Apple's WebKit rule for iOS App Store apps.
    - 323 5y ago
      You mean like disabling important functionality required by uBlock and other ad-blockers? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-still-hurts-privacy-security-innovation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-st...

zanethomas 5y ago

"As we reflect on the past two years of altered life amid the pandemic, the importance of the web and all it enables has been on high display. " Including all the censorship enabled.