4 ms·

You're not wrong. The W3C was focused on DTDs and semantic markup and whether HTML "validated" or not. They were focused on moving folks from "transitional" XHT

You're not wrong. The W3C was focused on DTDs and semantic markup and whether HTML "validated" or not. They were focused on moving folks from "transitional" XHTML to "strict" XHTML with no perceivable benefit. Meanwhile the WHATWG was interested in things like media tags and making interactive content be things other than Flash and Silverlight and Java. They got too lost in the sauce with what was essentially an academic exercise that didn't really benefit the end user.

tannhaeuser 2y ago
> The W3C was focused on DTDs No, imposing structure onto markup using DTDs had always been a useful and elegant technique. What W3C was busy with after subsetting XML from SGML as a canonical subset not requiring markup declarations/DTDs for mere parsing (which while useful was already possible and practiced using SGML profiles) is inventing ill-conceived modularization and meta conventions (namespaces, xsi, xinclude), entirely new schema and transformation/query languages, unrealistic and unproven design-by-comittee formatting and browser interactivity systems, and enormous enterprise messaging system ecosystems. And yes, semantic web stuff; graph DBs were a love affair of TBL's predating even the web (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENQUIRE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENQUIRE).
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  > a useful and elegant technique Maybe, but who does it benefit? What is the outcome for people using the web? How were the developers making websites benefiting? It wasn't a bad effort but it was focusing on something that didn't actually solve the biggest problems with the web. XHTML wasn't built for anyone real, it was built for an idealistic outcome. Private companies (Adobe, Sun, Microsoft, Real, Apple) had a literal monopoly on video and animation on the Web. A lack of interface between JavaScript and the DOM led to companies like Microsoft freely inventing their own stuff. If you want to be the steward of a technology, you have to care about the way people are actually using the technology. Otherwise someone else who actually does care will (and did!) come along and do something meaningful.

tannhaeuser 2y ago

> The W3C was focused on DTDs No, imposing structure onto markup using DTDs had always been a useful and elegant technique. What W3C was busy with after subsetting XML from SGML as a canonical subset not requiring markup declarations/DTDs for mere parsing (which while useful was already possible and practiced using SGML profiles) is inventing ill-conceived modularization and meta conventions (namespaces, xsi, xinclude), entirely new schema and transformation/query languages, unrealistic and unproven design-by-comittee formatting and browser interactivity systems, and enormous enterprise messaging system ecosystems. And yes, semantic web stuff; graph DBs were a love affair of TBL's predating even the web (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENQUIRE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENQUIRE).

bastawhiz 2y ago
> a useful and elegant technique Maybe, but who does it benefit? What is the outcome for people using the web? How were the developers making websites benefiting? It wasn't a bad effort but it was focusing on something that didn't actually solve the biggest problems with the web. XHTML wasn't built for anyone real, it was built for an idealistic outcome. Private companies (Adobe, Sun, Microsoft, Real, Apple) had a literal monopoly on video and animation on the Web. A lack of interface between JavaScript and the DOM led to companies like Microsoft freely inventing their own stuff. If you want to be the steward of a technology, you have to care about the way people are actually using the technology. Otherwise someone else who actually does care will (and did!) come along and do something meaningful.