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I reject this notion wholeheartedly. Ian Hickson’s steadfast commitment to web standards and rejection of the xHTML bandwagon who did not understand the differ

I reject this notion wholeheartedly. Ian Hickson’s steadfast commitment to web standards and rejection of the xHTML bandwagon who did not understand the difference between catastrophic failure and silent failures and its implications accordingly build the foundation of everything we have now that is called web. Web Development back then was a total mess and he alone took matters in his hands for the better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hickson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hickson While others evolved into spec warriors, Hixi put users and usability first by looking beyond specs. He is an unsung hero whose contributions made the difference. He faced so much hostility, yet was the only one who maintained and understood every aspect of these specs. One after another he won open standard evangelists over. It is like Linux vs Windows and not Google vs the rest.

Devasta 2y ago
In Hicksons own words: "The reality is that for all of the work that we've put into HTML, and CSS, and the DOM, it has fundamentally utterly failed to deliver on its promise. It's even worse than that, actually, because all of the things we've built aren't just not doing what we want, they're holding developers back. People build their applications on frameworks that _abstract out_ all the APIs we build for browsers, and _even with those frameworks_ developers are hamstrung by weird limitations of the web." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34622514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34622514 We can pretend that the W3C eggheads were up there in ivory towers with no understanding of how the web should move forward, but the reality is that a lot of modern web dev is tree like data structures being sent across the web to be rendered with client side templates, exactly what they were aiming for with XML and XSLT. Namespaces, custom elements, client side templating and more, the web had it all and threw it away so that we can instead spend the next century reimplementing worse versions of what XML provided out of the box.
- johnthescott 2y ago
  xslt failed due to an international shortage of greater-less than characters. apologies to SKB.

Devasta 2y ago

In Hicksons own words: "The reality is that for all of the work that we've put into HTML, and CSS, and the DOM, it has fundamentally utterly failed to deliver on its promise. It's even worse than that, actually, because all of the things we've built aren't just not doing what we want, they're holding developers back. People build their applications on frameworks that _abstract out_ all the APIs we build for browsers, and _even with those frameworks_ developers are hamstrung by weird limitations of the web." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34622514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34622514 We can pretend that the W3C eggheads were up there in ivory towers with no understanding of how the web should move forward, but the reality is that a lot of modern web dev is tree like data structures being sent across the web to be rendered with client side templates, exactly what they were aiming for with XML and XSLT. Namespaces, custom elements, client side templating and more, the web had it all and threw it away so that we can instead spend the next century reimplementing worse versions of what XML provided out of the box.

johnthescott 2y ago
xslt failed due to an international shortage of greater-less than characters. apologies to SKB.