5 ms·

What I'm learning from this thread today is that there's a lot of animosity to what WHATWG did when Hixie et al rebooted the standard (which at the time was eff

What I'm learning from this thread today is that there's a lot of animosity to what WHATWG did when Hixie et al rebooted the standard (which at the time was effectively dying and unmaintained). Can anyone explain this politicking and bad blood? Are there some people upset this long after it all happened?

gsnedders 4y ago
The very short tl;dr is there were a couple main contentions: * Continuing work on HTML at all, instead of furthering work on XHTML + XForms + etc. * Certain decisions, especially around accessibility & internationalisation, at a point where the editor (then Hixie) practically controlled the decision making.
andrewmcwatters 4y ago
They could have done it as a WG in W3C, but they decided not to. They instead created a separate organization and cabal which today is controlled de facto by Google.
- gsnedders 4y ago
  They couldn't: to form a W3C WG requires support of the staff and the W3C membership, and it was clear that there wasn't that support prior to the WHATWG's formation. I believe the original preference of those involved was to do it at the W3C. And indeed, Web Forms 2.0 was presented as a position paper by Opera and Mozilla at a W3C workshop in 2004, prior to the formation of the WHATWG, and voted down: https://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/papers/opera.html https://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/papers/opera.html
echelon 4y ago
They killed momentum on XHTML, which included reusable modularization and components. Inclusion of semantic web / structured RDF graph data was an objective, and this all got pushed by the wayside. Strict, structured data could have posed a threat to Google by enabling other search engines to more easily build fact-based competitors and crawl the web of rich data. The decentralized nature of OWL/RDF would have pushed the web closer to P2P aggregation (think RSS, FOAF, pingback...) The web could have been less Facebook-y, less Google-y, more Napster, more GPT-3 if XHTML had won.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  That last assertion is heavy speculation. Why are we assuming that, had XHTML been the dominant infrastructure, Facebook and Google wouldn't still be the best at leveraging it? And if anything, Google desperately did and does want people to semantically annotate data. They're extremely confident in their ability to be the best at organizing it, and well-annotated clean data is a huge benefit to them.
- goto11 4y ago
  RDF is independent of (X)HTML and W3C kept control of RDF and related standards. It is true that RDF have failed to live up to its promise, but this have nothing to do with WHATWG.
- bawolff 4y ago
  The RDF vision (where every website authors their own rdf graph in an open world sort of way, which web spiders search in a unified fashion) has tons of problems that its advocates refuse to acknowledge. Most notably lack of incentives to participate, complex authoring burden and poor scalability of graph querying. The only time rdf has had success is when there is only an extremely limited vocabulary allowed (xmp, certain other metadata standards) or when the ecosystem is closed so its just one site or group making the rdf (e.g. wikidata) It was never a threat to google because it was never going to win.
- ShroudedNight 4y ago
  Did the people driving the semantic web ever really get traction on the taxonomy problem? I vaguely remember a lot of hand-waving about semantic ontologies, but the mechanics to actual reconcile the widely divergent labels humans inevitably produce always seemed to be someone else's problem.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  What killed XHTML was the lack of backwards compatibility and especially the first-mover problem with embedding and the ads ecosystem. Namely, making a large production website fully validate was very hard, yielded zero ROI, and if anything went even slightly wrong such that invalid XML was emitted that would create a site outage that you couldn't easily detect server side. That's a bitter pill to swallow even as is, but now throw in the common practice of mixing in markup from third parties for ads, social buttons, login forms and other things and now you can have a major site outage caused at random by third parties, which, again, cannot be detected server side. As for RDF, GPT-3 is sort of the ultimate repudiation to that whole line of AI research. GPT-3 doesn't care about structured data at all, it can't even use it any better than a human would.
jrochkind1 4y ago
My read: A) WHATWG is totally controlled by the browser vendors, which have become even more of a small oligopoly than it seemed they would be 10 years ago. It's basically Apple, Mozilla, Google and Microsoft -- so those four organizations, three of which are enormous corporations, are controlling web standards. (And in practice it seems to mostly just be Google-controlled for whatever reason, but either way). Whereas W3C at least hypothetically was accountable to multiple stakeholders. B) The WHATWG "living standard" is not really a standard at all as many engineers understand or would like it.
- bawolff 4y ago
  The counter to (a) that, is if your standard is beholden to a bunch a stakeholders who aren't actually making the software, you're going to end up with something useless that nobody implements. The biggest difference between whatwg html and earlier w3c html is that people actually implemented whatwg html where w3c standards were more wishful thinking that never got used or implemented (rip xhtml).
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    XHTML 1.x was well implemented in most browsers and was highly used by a subset of web developers. XHTML 1.x also did a lot to help shake out things like "quirks mode" versus "standards mode". HTML 5 imported a lot of things that worked from XHTML 1.x. It's true that XHTML 2.0 was murdered before the spec finished but that was part and parcel of the WHATWG coup. We have no idea what the final product from XHTML 2.0 would have looked like (it certainly didn't look useless, though it aimed for the stars and probably wouldn't have met them) or if it had implemented if it would have been used because the browser implementors had already decided they were going to take charge instead.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      > it certainly didn't look useless, though it aimed for the stars and probably wouldn't have met them That one sentence pretty much sums up why w3c is a bad standards body. A standards body is not a research group. If you are aiming for the stars you are doing it wrong. A standards body is supposed to be doing the boring work of formalizing what is known to work well, not try and invent new untested things.
goto11 4y ago
WHATWG did the right thing because W3C had basically abandoned HTML at the time. A fork of the spec was the only was forward for the web. But WHATWG is fully controlled by the browser vendors where W3C was more neutral.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  It depends on if you agree that the focus on XHTML as the way forward (and out of "quirks mode") for the web was "abandoning" HTML or not.
  - goto11 4y ago
    Quirks mode is a backwards-compatible rendering mode which retains certain historical bugs in the CSS implementation. It is completely independent of the HTML/XHTML divide which is about the syntax of HTML.
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      Hammering out how strict XHTML was to be was a big part of the browser conception of "modes" to begin with. XHTML itself as a standard suggested "three modes" Transitional, Strict, and Frameset. Transitional XHTML was still more strict than classic "quirks mode" (though obviously much less strict than Strict XHTML which was too strict for most people) which got its name somewhat in contrast. Quirks mode survived for a while longer after XHTML declined because of things like historical bugs in CSS (and ES3-), but trying to clean up many of those historical bugs was considered a part of the reason for XHTML and part of why XHTML suggested multiple "modes" that documents could opt into to get better behavior.
      - goto11 4y ago
        The three XHTML DTD's (Transitional, Strict, Frameset) were just copied from the HTML 4.0 spec, so they are independent of the HTML/XHTML divide. There are really three independent things in play: - DTD's define a set of valid elements and attributes. - Quirks/standards rendering modes affect how CSS is rendered. - The HTML/XHTML divide is about the low-level HTML syntax and how invalid syntax should be handled. These are all independent concerns since CSS operates on the parsed tree of elements and doesn't care about lexical syntax or DTD's. XHTML did not attempt to address the quirks/standards mode issues at all, since this is the domain of CSS.
WaitWaitWha 4y ago
Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) https://whatwg.org/ https://whatwg.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG
pwdisswordfishc 4y ago
I can’t speak for everyone else, but I am resentful that it promoted the Web as an platform for running applications containing arbitrarily-complex (Turing-complete) code instead of a platform for exchanging structured (declarative) documents, I despise the philosophy of ‘backwards compatibility at all costs’ it follows, and the massive volume of standards documents it produces, all of which basically guaranteed the browser engine (quasi-)market would remain an oligopoly, by making it prohibitively expensive for new, leaner yet practical implementations to emerge (both because of the initial cost of catching up with the current state of the art and also of keeping up with the Red Queen’s Race of the ever-evolving ‘living standards’; just look at the sorry state of NetSurf). Not to mention the security holes their attitude engendered. If we moved to XHTML, maybe we wouldn’t have the meta-utopia Web 2.0 promised, but at least we wouldn’t have CVE-2020-26870. The WHATWG was formed as a cartel of browser vendors that pretended to be a standards body. And these days even ‘cartel’ may be too generous, now it’s just a Chrome rubber-stamping committee.
tinus_hn 4y ago
As far as I remember the (W3C) standard wasn’t really unmaintained, it was going in a direction nobody cared about with its focus on xhtml. In the meantime IE6 had all but won the browser wars and completely strangled innovation in a striking demonstration of the problems with a monopoly. The web needed to be shook up.
cwmma 4y ago
The W3C went down a rabbit hole of XML based stuff with an emphasis on everything being well formed and valid. There was a time 15 or so years ago when XHTML a version of HTML which was also valid XML was being touted as the way forward. This meant that if there were any errors in the page it would just though an error, as opposed to HTML which would try it's best. WHATWG was created in frustration with that approach and saw the XHTML and other XML stuff being a case of Architectural Astronomy (which is not to say they weren't doing anything, just they weren't doing anything seen as useful) and they created HTML5 which was a standard based on how HTML worked in the wild and explicitly codified how tag soup and other invalid pages should be shown. HTML5 really revitalized the web at a time when it was pretty stagnant. WHATWG has always had a pretty practical approach to standards that boils down to the fact that whoever builds a browser ends up having the final say in what goes into the spec because it doesn't matter if there is some cool feature that nobody wants to ship, if nobody ships it it's fundamentally not part of the spec because it can't be used. This does end up meaning that WHATWG ends up being just made up of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla. There is some irony as the descriptive HTML5 which tried to codify how HTML worked in the wild made it so complicated to create an HTML parser that now only a megacorp could actually afford to do so.

gsnedders 4y ago

The very short tl;dr is there were a couple main contentions: * Continuing work on HTML at all, instead of furthering work on XHTML + XForms + etc. * Certain decisions, especially around accessibility & internationalisation, at a point where the editor (then Hixie) practically controlled the decision making.

andrewmcwatters 4y ago

They could have done it as a WG in W3C, but they decided not to. They instead created a separate organization and cabal which today is controlled de facto by Google.

gsnedders 4y ago
They couldn't: to form a W3C WG requires support of the staff and the W3C membership, and it was clear that there wasn't that support prior to the WHATWG's formation. I believe the original preference of those involved was to do it at the W3C. And indeed, Web Forms 2.0 was presented as a position paper by Opera and Mozilla at a W3C workshop in 2004, prior to the formation of the WHATWG, and voted down: https://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/papers/opera.html https://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/papers/opera.html

echelon 4y ago

They killed momentum on XHTML, which included reusable modularization and components. Inclusion of semantic web / structured RDF graph data was an objective, and this all got pushed by the wayside. Strict, structured data could have posed a threat to Google by enabling other search engines to more easily build fact-based competitors and crawl the web of rich data. The decentralized nature of OWL/RDF would have pushed the web closer to P2P aggregation (think RSS, FOAF, pingback...) The web could have been less Facebook-y, less Google-y, more Napster, more GPT-3 if XHTML had won.

shadowgovt 4y ago
That last assertion is heavy speculation. Why are we assuming that, had XHTML been the dominant infrastructure, Facebook and Google wouldn't still be the best at leveraging it? And if anything, Google desperately did and does want people to semantically annotate data. They're extremely confident in their ability to be the best at organizing it, and well-annotated clean data is a huge benefit to them.
goto11 4y ago
RDF is independent of (X)HTML and W3C kept control of RDF and related standards. It is true that RDF have failed to live up to its promise, but this have nothing to do with WHATWG.
bawolff 4y ago
The RDF vision (where every website authors their own rdf graph in an open world sort of way, which web spiders search in a unified fashion) has tons of problems that its advocates refuse to acknowledge. Most notably lack of incentives to participate, complex authoring burden and poor scalability of graph querying. The only time rdf has had success is when there is only an extremely limited vocabulary allowed (xmp, certain other metadata standards) or when the ecosystem is closed so its just one site or group making the rdf (e.g. wikidata) It was never a threat to google because it was never going to win.
ShroudedNight 4y ago
Did the people driving the semantic web ever really get traction on the taxonomy problem? I vaguely remember a lot of hand-waving about semantic ontologies, but the mechanics to actual reconcile the widely divergent labels humans inevitably produce always seemed to be someone else's problem.
mike_hearn 4y ago
What killed XHTML was the lack of backwards compatibility and especially the first-mover problem with embedding and the ads ecosystem. Namely, making a large production website fully validate was very hard, yielded zero ROI, and if anything went even slightly wrong such that invalid XML was emitted that would create a site outage that you couldn't easily detect server side. That's a bitter pill to swallow even as is, but now throw in the common practice of mixing in markup from third parties for ads, social buttons, login forms and other things and now you can have a major site outage caused at random by third parties, which, again, cannot be detected server side. As for RDF, GPT-3 is sort of the ultimate repudiation to that whole line of AI research. GPT-3 doesn't care about structured data at all, it can't even use it any better than a human would.

jrochkind1 4y ago

My read: A) WHATWG is totally controlled by the browser vendors, which have become even more of a small oligopoly than it seemed they would be 10 years ago. It's basically Apple, Mozilla, Google and Microsoft -- so those four organizations, three of which are enormous corporations, are controlling web standards. (And in practice it seems to mostly just be Google-controlled for whatever reason, but either way). Whereas W3C at least hypothetically was accountable to multiple stakeholders. B) The WHATWG "living standard" is not really a standard at all as many engineers understand or would like it.

bawolff 4y ago
The counter to (a) that, is if your standard is beholden to a bunch a stakeholders who aren't actually making the software, you're going to end up with something useless that nobody implements. The biggest difference between whatwg html and earlier w3c html is that people actually implemented whatwg html where w3c standards were more wishful thinking that never got used or implemented (rip xhtml).
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  XHTML 1.x was well implemented in most browsers and was highly used by a subset of web developers. XHTML 1.x also did a lot to help shake out things like "quirks mode" versus "standards mode". HTML 5 imported a lot of things that worked from XHTML 1.x. It's true that XHTML 2.0 was murdered before the spec finished but that was part and parcel of the WHATWG coup. We have no idea what the final product from XHTML 2.0 would have looked like (it certainly didn't look useless, though it aimed for the stars and probably wouldn't have met them) or if it had implemented if it would have been used because the browser implementors had already decided they were going to take charge instead.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    > it certainly didn't look useless, though it aimed for the stars and probably wouldn't have met them That one sentence pretty much sums up why w3c is a bad standards body. A standards body is not a research group. If you are aiming for the stars you are doing it wrong. A standards body is supposed to be doing the boring work of formalizing what is known to work well, not try and invent new untested things.

goto11 4y ago

WHATWG did the right thing because W3C had basically abandoned HTML at the time. A fork of the spec was the only was forward for the web. But WHATWG is fully controlled by the browser vendors where W3C was more neutral.

WorldMaker 4y ago
It depends on if you agree that the focus on XHTML as the way forward (and out of "quirks mode") for the web was "abandoning" HTML or not.
- goto11 4y ago
  Quirks mode is a backwards-compatible rendering mode which retains certain historical bugs in the CSS implementation. It is completely independent of the HTML/XHTML divide which is about the syntax of HTML.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    Hammering out how strict XHTML was to be was a big part of the browser conception of "modes" to begin with. XHTML itself as a standard suggested "three modes" Transitional, Strict, and Frameset. Transitional XHTML was still more strict than classic "quirks mode" (though obviously much less strict than Strict XHTML which was too strict for most people) which got its name somewhat in contrast. Quirks mode survived for a while longer after XHTML declined because of things like historical bugs in CSS (and ES3-), but trying to clean up many of those historical bugs was considered a part of the reason for XHTML and part of why XHTML suggested multiple "modes" that documents could opt into to get better behavior.
    - goto11 4y ago
      The three XHTML DTD's (Transitional, Strict, Frameset) were just copied from the HTML 4.0 spec, so they are independent of the HTML/XHTML divide. There are really three independent things in play: - DTD's define a set of valid elements and attributes. - Quirks/standards rendering modes affect how CSS is rendered. - The HTML/XHTML divide is about the low-level HTML syntax and how invalid syntax should be handled. These are all independent concerns since CSS operates on the parsed tree of elements and doesn't care about lexical syntax or DTD's. XHTML did not attempt to address the quirks/standards mode issues at all, since this is the domain of CSS.

WaitWaitWha 4y ago

Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) https://whatwg.org/ https://whatwg.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG

pwdisswordfishc 4y ago

I can’t speak for everyone else, but I am resentful that it promoted the Web as an platform for running applications containing arbitrarily-complex (Turing-complete) code instead of a platform for exchanging structured (declarative) documents, I despise the philosophy of ‘backwards compatibility at all costs’ it follows, and the massive volume of standards documents it produces, all of which basically guaranteed the browser engine (quasi-)market would remain an oligopoly, by making it prohibitively expensive for new, leaner yet practical implementations to emerge (both because of the initial cost of catching up with the current state of the art and also of keeping up with the Red Queen’s Race of the ever-evolving ‘living standards’; just look at the sorry state of NetSurf). Not to mention the security holes their attitude engendered. If we moved to XHTML, maybe we wouldn’t have the meta-utopia Web 2.0 promised, but at least we wouldn’t have CVE-2020-26870. The WHATWG was formed as a cartel of browser vendors that pretended to be a standards body. And these days even ‘cartel’ may be too generous, now it’s just a Chrome rubber-stamping committee.

tinus_hn 4y ago

As far as I remember the (W3C) standard wasn’t really unmaintained, it was going in a direction nobody cared about with its focus on xhtml. In the meantime IE6 had all but won the browser wars and completely strangled innovation in a striking demonstration of the problems with a monopoly. The web needed to be shook up.

cwmma 4y ago

The W3C went down a rabbit hole of XML based stuff with an emphasis on everything being well formed and valid. There was a time 15 or so years ago when XHTML a version of HTML which was also valid XML was being touted as the way forward. This meant that if there were any errors in the page it would just though an error, as opposed to HTML which would try it's best. WHATWG was created in frustration with that approach and saw the XHTML and other XML stuff being a case of Architectural Astronomy (which is not to say they weren't doing anything, just they weren't doing anything seen as useful) and they created HTML5 which was a standard based on how HTML worked in the wild and explicitly codified how tag soup and other invalid pages should be shown. HTML5 really revitalized the web at a time when it was pretty stagnant. WHATWG has always had a pretty practical approach to standards that boils down to the fact that whoever builds a browser ends up having the final say in what goes into the spec because it doesn't matter if there is some cool feature that nobody wants to ship, if nobody ships it it's fundamentally not part of the spec because it can't be used. This does end up meaning that WHATWG ends up being just made up of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla. There is some irony as the descriptive HTML5 which tried to codify how HTML worked in the wild made it so complicated to create an HTML parser that now only a megacorp could actually afford to do so.