Hacker News Reader

Comment by domenicd | Hacker News Reader

Not sure exactly what your comment is saying, but at least one reading is that "browsers are the only stakeholders in the WHATWG", which is not accurate. The WHATWG is a community organization open to participation by all; see https://whatwg.org/faq#process for more. We receive a lot of participation from users, web developers, and other companies.

There is a formal group, the Steering Group, which represents the browsers that implement WHATWG standards, and serves as the point of final appeal if the community doesn't come to a consensus on its own. But this is similar to the W3C appeals track where if all the paying member companies don't come to consensus, they appeal to "The Director" as the ultimate decider. ("The Director" is nominally Tim Berners-Lee, but recently all Director decisions have been made by W3C management "on behalf of" The Director.)

View on HN

Are there any non-browser members as part of the editors or steering committee in the whatwg?

To me, this is giving browser makers even more power over HTML than they have otherwise.

The MIME Sniffing, Streams, Console, and Quirks Mode Standards are all edited by people who are not working for the browser-engine-developer companies. (Streams is co-edited by Googlers as well.) That's 4 out of the 15 standards currently developed at the WHATWG; not so bad, given how few companies are willing to pay people to work full time on web standards.

Of course, we have lots of work to do, and if you or anyone else are able to devote a good chunk of time to standards work, we'd love to have more editors---no matter what company they work for.

Browser engine developers comprise the steering group, since ultimately we want the specs to reflect what will be implemented in web browsers, so the best way to resolve disputes about what should be in the spec is by asking the people who will be spending their resources to implement it what they think. I think this is probably the right way to go, instead of "The Director" having the final voice.

> That's 4 out of the 15 standards currently developed at the WHATWG; not so bad, given how few companies are willing to pay people to work full time on web standards.

Thats actually nice to know, but specifically about HTML (which is one of the most important specs the whatwg works on) it's all browser makers. (That too, majority of them from one particular browser maker).

>I think this is probably the right way to go, instead of "The Director" having the final voice.

I think having a better mix of people in the decision making process than just browser makers would be the right way to go. I understand that browser makers have to implement the specs, but the web community as a whole has to use the specs to build the web of the future - and as such, people from non-browser companies should have a greater say in the final voice.

Oh, you're right, I forgot HTML! That is co-edited by someone from Bocoup too. So make it 5 out of 15.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com