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Comment by saas_co_de | Hacker News Reader

Tldr is that corporations don't want a standards body with any public input so they created their own competing body, strangled w3c, and are now saying w3c is limited to being a rubber stamp for the standards they create.

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This is not remotely the case. W3C used to be the reference, up until when they obstinately championed XHTML 2.0 that nobody wanted to write. Meanwhile, browser vendors wanted to implement all the fun stuff that web apps need but were being blocked by the W3C's glacial speed. So they just founded the WHATWG for collaboration and standardization, and since then W3C has beed ripping off the WHATWG's standards but always with inexplicable alterations.

This isn't accurate; notably, the WHATWG is the standards body that is actually open to public input (see https://whatwg.org/faq#process). Whereas to give input to the W3C, you have to pay membership fees (https://www.w3.org/Consortium/fees; between $2250 and $77K depending on company size for the US). This latter model is commonly referred to as "pay-to-play" standardization.

You can give input to the W3C without that, but yeah, it's the input from the paying members that counts the most.

Additionally, the W3C has some private mailing lists, does private working group meetings, and so on. So yeah, the WHATWG is a lot more open when it comes to input.

> Additionally, the W3C has some private mailing lists, does private working group meetings, and so on.

For all the web platform stuff (I don't know about the semweb and digital publishing side of things), you can basically ignore the existence of the private mailing lists (they get basically no traffic, and people like me start screaming whenever anyone tries to have a technical discussion there). I'd rather they didn't exist, but realistically they're not a barrier to participation.

The F2F meetings and telecons are more problematic (because both are inherently exclusionary, either in time or in travel), but those are at least publicly minuted and any resolution from them can be overturned.

Unfortunately that's over-simplification of the problem.

10-15 years we were told that use of <table>s for layout purposes was terribly wrong. Without any reliable alternative mechanism.

Here is my proposal to W3C CSS WG to add flow property and flex units: https://www.terrainformatica.com/w3/flex-layout/flex-layout.... It covers as flexbox as grid features under the same mechanism. Yet it establishes robust framework for other layout methods.

Note it is dated April, 5, 2009. It took us almost 10 years to have something matching that.

So neither W3C process nor WHATWG process is perfect - there is no reliable feedback from customers (web designers) to browser vendors.

What if browser would provide us just abstract DOM with minimal HTML/CSS implementation and some extensibility/plug-ins mechanism with something like Java.

In this case we, the community, can provide better implementations:

   main {
     flow: HolyGrailLayout(params) url(/layouts/HolyGrail.class);
   }

   <main>
     <header>  
     <footer>
     <aside>
   </main>

So instead of waiting for the weather for 10 years we will do something literally tomorrow when we need it.

In this case W3C will be able to perfectly fit its role - high-level management of all this.

No one can manage the reality up to need of toilet paper in full. USSR tried and where did it go?

> What if browser would provide us just abstract DOM with minimal HTML/CSS implementation and some extensibility/plug-ins

That's what Houdini layout extensions are about, if that work ever comes to fruition that will indeed be a pretty major advance for web design.

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