Comment by mcchampion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcchampion | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com