""The real problem is of course that the W3C is still copying our work even after we asked them to stop doing that," [Anne] van Kesteren said. It's legal, but "oftentimes it comes pretty close [to] or is actual plagiarism."
It's one of many instances of copying, Hickson said. "For reasons that defy my understanding, the W3C staff refuse to treat the WHATWG as a peer organization" that relies on WHATWG's work, he said. Instead, it creates its own copies of some standards. "They'll eventually say they have a 'final' version, and then they'll stop fixing bugs. It's very sad."
It's amusing to me to watch the WHATWG people complain about the W3C having the temerity to put out revisions to their own specification, and then complaining about how the W3C is copying their work. Would they rather W3C put out an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT HTML specification from theirs? Would that be better for anyone at all?
The other huge accomplishment of HTML5 is completely standardizing many fundamental parts of the web that previously were a mess of browser incompatibilities. 6 years ago, if you wanted to parse HTML, you might reach for BeautifulSoup, or libxml, or Hpricot, or Nokogiri...and they would all be subtly different in the parse tree they produced. And they couldn't do any better, because if you viewed the page in IE, or Firefox, or Chrome, or Safari, you might get a different parse tree.
Now, IE9+, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are all basically guaranteed to look at the same page in the same way, and the "toolsmith" parsers like Gumbo or html5lib are all rapidly converging on the standard. So it's finally possible to see a page the way a browser sees it.
> Now, IE9+, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are all basically guaranteed to look at the same page in the same way, and the "toolsmith" parsers like Gumbo or html5lib are all rapidly converging on the standard. So it's finally possible to see a page the way a browser sees it.
The web projects I have to take part on, are a distant reality from that description.
In the past, only Mozilla cared about what the W3C said, and they built Firefox on the idea that interoperability by following the standards is the way to go. Not that long after Apple initiated Safari, and led Google to their own browser initiative.
All this because Mozilla, the insignificant actor of the all IE time, decided to follow W3C.
You're not totally wrong telling that W3C doesn't mater that much, but browsers are what they are today because of W3C for a good part, and it still have a very important place in the browser game.
I'm hoping for a scene graph standard for HTML6 and a spec that allows multiple documents per window (which themselves could be nodes on a scene graph) instead of the one document per window.
Does anyone know how is Doctype versioning going to work with W3Cs snapshoting of the living standard? Or are browsers just going to ignore W3C and stick to implementing WHATWGs spec?
No browser ever paid any attention to the version of the HTML specified. The only use for DOCTYPE—and the reason it remains in HTML5—is "doctype switching", i.e. different rendering modes are triggered in the browsers. You can use "html", "html5", "html6.2" or "foobarbaz" as your doctype, the effect will be the same—they will all trigger standards compliant mode.
I was hoping they would add file api support for downloading to non sand boxed environment with mandatory user interaction prompts. The api would prompt for the file download location (via file dialog) but after that, how the file is filled up is up to the web client (and happens in the background). This would allow for parallel download workers via the existing get range option.
http://html5doctor.com/the-ride-to-5/ is an interesting overview of perspectives of various people who've been around HTML5 for years about its publication as a REC.
[+] [-] johansch|11 years ago|reply
""The real problem is of course that the W3C is still copying our work even after we asked them to stop doing that," [Anne] van Kesteren said. It's legal, but "oftentimes it comes pretty close [to] or is actual plagiarism."
It's one of many instances of copying, Hickson said. "For reasons that defy my understanding, the W3C staff refuse to treat the WHATWG as a peer organization" that relies on WHATWG's work, he said. Instead, it creates its own copies of some standards. "They'll eventually say they have a 'final' version, and then they'll stop fixing bugs. It's very sad."
[+] [-] cwyers|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostrademons|11 years ago|reply
Now, IE9+, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are all basically guaranteed to look at the same page in the same way, and the "toolsmith" parsers like Gumbo or html5lib are all rapidly converging on the standard. So it's finally possible to see a page the way a browser sees it.
[+] [-] pjmlp|11 years ago|reply
The web projects I have to take part on, are a distant reality from that description.
[+] [-] malandrew|11 years ago|reply
From what I found, it seems like this is the most mature NodeJS module for using Gumbo:
https://github.com/karlwestin/node-gumbo-parser
[+] [-] lucideer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuhong|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RexRollman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwyers|11 years ago|reply
http://www.cnet.com/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups-still-...
[+] [-] j4meserljoness|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valisystem|11 years ago|reply
In the past, only Mozilla cared about what the W3C said, and they built Firefox on the idea that interoperability by following the standards is the way to go. Not that long after Apple initiated Safari, and led Google to their own browser initiative.
All this because Mozilla, the insignificant actor of the all IE time, decided to follow W3C.
You're not totally wrong telling that W3C doesn't mater that much, but browsers are what they are today because of W3C for a good part, and it still have a very important place in the browser game.
[+] [-] codeaken|11 years ago|reply
http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/
[+] [-] indubitably|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Igglyboo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bouk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malandrew|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malandrew|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] annamarie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sigvef|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaredmcateer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuhong|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rimantas|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] currysausage|11 years ago|reply
Well, do you think browser vendors will just stop implementing new features because the W3C decides that HTML 5 finished?
[+] [-] taf2|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ushi|11 years ago|reply
[0] https://github.com/othree/html5.vim
[+] [-] deskamess|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsnedders|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yoran|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuhong|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyriakos|11 years ago|reply