Two HTML Standards Diverge in a Wood

http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/07/html-groups-part-ways/

by darkxanthos • 14 years ago

52 19 14 years ago

rmccue• 14 years ago

> Anything is possible, but we remain hopeful that that won’t happen, at least in part because the W3C standard is more of a branch than a fork.

In terms of VCSes, it's essentially a release branch, with "HTML 5" being the eventual endpoint (tag) of it.

ekidd• 14 years ago

Well, that's what everybody is hoping for, at least.

The worst-case scenario is that the W3C HTML 5 working group goes wildly astray and writes a horrible standard that nobody implements. Remember HTML 3.0? XHTML 2.0? SMILE 2.0? WS-*?

Standards committees have a tendency to produce 300-page specs where every feature is both optional and vague. The recent OAuth2 rant describes the process perfectly:

http://hueniverse.com/2012/07/oauth-2-0-and-the-road-to-hell...

So the real fear here is that without Ian Hickson, the W3C may loose sight of the ball. Again. But in that case, I imagine the browser vendors will happily ignore them. Again.

catilac• 14 years ago

>What some developers fear is that down the road the two >specs will diverge in significant ways and HTML will become >a messy set of forked standards and varying browser support >that lands us back in the bad old days of IE 6

This is what I'm worried about myself, but I'd like to think that anyone involved with either parties would work together to ensure that it didn't.

qatalo• 14 years ago

This must be killed RIGHT NOW.

hughw• 14 years ago

Why?

kayoone• 14 years ago

Hard to believe that they really decided that this is the best way to go forward given all the HTML standard troubles we already have and had in the past.

SeanDav3• 14 years ago

This sort of process does more damage to technological innovation than almost anything else I can think of (besides the music and film industry). Look at the state of Unix for example. A free, powerful operating system should be a no brainer for anyone. Until you ask yourself a few basic questions, like which flavour, and religious wars break out.

If Unix or Linux could have limited itself to a far smaller subset, it would likely have taken over the world by now.

This is why the world needs people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Linus et al.

I shudder when I think of the type of damage this sort of thing can do to HTML and web technology.

icebraining3• 14 years ago

If Unix or Linux could have limited itself to a far smaller subset, it would likely have taken over the world by now.

Uhm, Unix and Linux do own the world. Desktop PCs are an anomaly in the computing world: phones, servers, TVs, tablets, networking gear, supercomputers, multimedia players, many GPS devices, are all predominantly running Unix or Unix-like.

I shudder when I think of the type of damage this sort of thing can do to HTML and web technology.

Breaks to the standard web technologies have brought us, among others:

- JPEG support (Netscape)

- File uploads (Netscape)

- Javascript (Netscape)

- AJAX/XMLHttpRequest (IE)

- Canvas (Apple's Webkit)

- nofollow links (Google)

They can be problematic if they're proprietary (i.e. ActiveX), but they're not necessarily bad.

billswift• 14 years ago

A few years ago, when Eric Raymond was complaining about proprietary GPS related "standards", http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=888 , I drew what I think is a useful distinction in a comment:

An “unreleased standard” is not a standard, it’s a specification. Conversely, a standard is a shared specification.

And the same could be said for proprietary "standards". But in the case of HTML5, they are both open standards, just with different "forms of presentation", I guess would be the most useful term. One is a moving, transient standard, the other (W3C) is a series of snapshots.

SeanDav3• 14 years ago

- Which Unix or Linux would that be?

- Interesting that you think desktop computing is an anomaly. I must have imagined the whole PC revolution thing then...

- Also interesting that you think that the current split in HTML5 standards is going to lead to good things. Care to explain how?

__david__• 14 years ago

> If Unix or Linux could have limited itself to a far smaller subset, it would likely have taken over the world by now.

You mean, like POSIX?

beagle3• 14 years ago

We've sort of been through that some 10 years ago, with the XHTML vs. HTML4, which people originally tried to conform to both, then consolidate, then threw XHTML out the window, because practicality beats purity.

History does not exactly repeat, but it rhymes really well.

pepve• 14 years ago

This sounds a lot scarier than in actually is. It is highly unlikely that one vendor will stick with the W3C and another with the WHATWG. (Yeah, I care more about what vendors will do than what standards bodies do.) I think cross-browser compatibility will keep increasing, as it is doing right now. (The three way split in market share helps.)

wmf• 14 years ago

This isn't a problem. W3C is working on the HTML5 standard while WHATWG is working on the "HTML Living Standard" or what you might call HTML-HEAD or HTML6-beta. http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/

hoppipolla• 14 years ago

Technically there is still only one "HTML5" standard; the W3C one.

WHATWG are editing the "HTML Living Standard". Unlike the W3C model, there aren't version numbers or set phases that the spec must go through. Instead there is a process of continuous development; fixing bugs as they are found and continually iterating new features in response to the evolving needs of the web. This process is modeled around the way that browsers are actually developed, and should help innovation on the web keep pace with proprietary platforms.

The goal of the W3C version is somewhat different; it is essentially a branch aimed at stabilisation (likely at the expense of accuracy) in order that there is a well defined set of technologies covered by the W3C Patent Policy. It is also governed by a somewhat different (consensus based) decision making policy compared to the WHATWG version (the editor specs what people are willing to implement). History suggests that any differences that arise are most likely to be in things that don't affect UA interoperability but concern the definition of a valid document.

So the net effect of this change is that we will once again have a version of the HTML spec being developed using the system (and at the speed) that gave us HTML5 in the first place.

Two HTML Standards Diverge in a Wood

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