Comment by lambda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lambda | Hacker News Reader

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The W3C actually does do some good work in other working groups; the CSS working groups seem to be working smoothly.

The W3C also oversees a lot of other standardization processes that aren't directly related to web browsers, like RDF. There are people who find this useful.

I think a lot of it is a power play. The W3C wants to be relevant, and the most relevant things in the web world are HTML, DOM, and CSS (there's also ECMAScript, but that already has a different standards body that owns it).

There are a lot of other standards that use HTML, CSS, and the DOM, such as ePub. The W3C wants to be the normative reference for these core web standards; many times, one standard will have to refer to the other, so the W3C wants to be the one that defines the "official" HTML standard.

But the W3C's process and policies are just terrible. They let people take over standards who have no intent on working with those most impacted by the standards, the people who develop the browsers that billions of people use daily to access tons of diverse content. So instead of just providing a lightly edited snapshot, possibly with some WIP features removed, of what the WHATWG produces, they start going in and meddling and making changes with insufficient justification so you have two forked standards providing a lot of confusion for everyone.

> The W3C actually does do some good work in other working groups; the CSS working groups seem to be working smoothly.

The W3C is also doing work in HTML at least too. If browser makers would actually participate as editors (like they do in CSS) then it would work just as well as the CSS working groups and others.

> If browser makers would actually participate as editors

Microsoft tried that, investing in easier to use GitHub tooling to allow a wide range of people to submit pull requests to update/fix bugs in the W3C HTML standard. "If you build the field of dreams, they will come...." Nope. "They" had all gone to WHATWG ballpark, and all the W3C editors do is cherrypick (that's the actual word in the HTML 5.2 Recommendation) WHATWG's specs. It made a LOT more sense to just join WHATWG for HTML (and DOM).

> > The W3C actually does do some good work in other working groups

Right, W3C as a whole does a lot of good work. CSS is a good example, Web Payments, Web Authentication, Web Assembly come to mind as groups where a broad group really does come together and build consensus on how to solve hard problems. The HTML and DOM communities, however, have moved to WHATWG for reasons that happened long ago and apparently can't be un-done, even if a company with Microsoft's resources tries.

>Microsoft tried that, investing in easier to use GitHub tooling to allow a wide range of people to submit pull requests to update/fix bugs in the W3C HTML standard. "If you build the field of dreams, they will come...." Nope. "They" had all gone to WHATWG ballpark, and all the W3C editors do is cherrypick (that's the actual word in the HTML 5.2 Recommendation) WHATWG's specs. It made a LOT more sense to just join WHATWG for HTML (and DOM).

It won't work if only one browser maker will participate. If only microsoft participated and implementing things in the CSS WG then nothing really would get done over there too.

If all the browser makers would have editors in the w3c html spec (like they do in many other w3c specs) and agree to implement stuff there, then that would also work.

How would one convince the others to re-invest in W3C HTML and DOM? Microsoft's rationale a few years ago was that WHATWG wasn't a real standards organization with a patent policy, dispute resolution system, etc., and that created various legal and business concerns.

It turned out to be much easier to add a legal framework to WHATWG than to convince the HTML and DOM standards community to move back to W3C. Basically, people work on specs (and code) together in the places where there is a critical mass of expertise and energy being productively engaged. The key variable is the people, not the organization.

I don't understand the dynamics of how these critical masses of expertise coalesce, break up, and move around. I have learned that it's much more efficient to go with the flow than try to redirect it.

What good work is it doing in HTML?

In HTML, as far as I can tell, it appears to be copying features from the WHATWG standard, paraphrasing them, and including them in their standard, with only a small notice on the acknowledgements page the the HTML standard contains parts derived from the WHATWG standard.

The browser makers did participate. They participated in the W3C working groups up until they were shot down when trying to propose to work on features that users actually wanted and would be backwards compatible rather than backwards-incompatible XHTML 2.0.

The browser makers then proceeded to do their work on rich web applications, with features like canvas and XMLHttpRequest, as well as actually putting together a spec for how to consistently parse HTML that would be compatible with real content, in the WHATWG.

When it was clear that the WHATWG standard was the one that actually mattered because it was what was actually implemented, the W3C invited them back in to start working on the standard together. That's what HTML5 was; the W3C agreed that they would start from the WHATWG standard, that they could have the same editor (Ian Hickson), and they wound down the XHTML 2.0 group.

However, various people involved in the W3C process proceeded to use bureaucratic moves to raise formal objections to things that had been changed, and escalated the issues above the editor. Eventually, he got fed up and left the process, and most of the browser vendors proceeded to continue working through the WHATWG. Microsoft was the last holdout, but eventually they too left the W3C process and moved over the the WHATWG as well.

So, the browser vendors have tried to work directly with the W3C on the HTML spec twice, once before the WHATWG split off and once as part of the attempted reconciliation. Both times, they were stymied by other people involved in the process who were more interested in purity and process than actually providing a forum for working out a good specification for real world implementation.

>What good work is it doing in HTML?

From my experience, it has generally done a better job of explaining things developers would want to know, especially in terms of accessibility and internationalisation.

The XHTML stuff was a long time back, and at that time, it warranted having a whatwg. Now that W3C is no longer insisting on XHTML (and hasn't for many years).

>When it was clear that the WHATWG standard was the one that actually mattered because it was what was actually implemented, the W3C invited them back in to start working on the standard together. That's what HTML5 was; the W3C agreed that they would start from the WHATWG standard, that they could have the same editor (Ian Hickson), and they wound down the XHTML 2.0 group.

This is the crux of it. The WHATWG is really usefull for browser vendors because they can do essentially whatever they want in it without anyone having the power to formally object to it (unlike the W3C). Now the whatwg editors (and thus browser makers) can say that they will listen to community feedback, but thats pretty much a benign dictatorship over the most important spec of the web.

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