Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghostpepper | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of the comments in this thread are trying to evaluate the privacy concerns on merit, which makes sense, but IMHO it's also instructive to look at the fact that other W3C members don't want this included and Google is able to do it anyway. Perhaps that should be the bigger cause for alarm than any one feature.

View on HN

In Google's defense, and basically because I like this particular feature, I have to point out the obvious ... most new browser features happen before and not after standardization.

The standardization process is meant for reaching agreement among browser makers and to provide clear specs for those features. But it isn't meant for exploration.

That has always been the case. Even Mozilla does it. And if not, then you can't really get the browser vendors to agree on mostly anything a priori, without market validation.

Standardization works as a refinement of already existing work. E.g. Google came with NaCL/PNaCL which was basically their own ActiveX, Mozilla came with Asm.js in response and the end result was Web Assembly, which is objectively better than both and that wouldn't have happened without that prior art.

The W3C doesn't guard what gets implemented in browsers. It never did. And if browser makers willingly participate in the standardization process, we should thank them, because they can always stop doing it. Because really, retreating from the W3C would mean absolutely nothing for computer illiterate people.

To elaborate, the process for standardizing browser features today is whatwg managed, not w3c. And it's basically "write a proposal, solicit feedback, implement the feature in one browser, and if it's ever implemented in 3 browsers it's part of the standard".

WHATWG is mostly HTML and DOM/browser api:s, ECMAscript is by TC39, CSS is still in W3C, URI schemes (which this is about) are in W3C, as seen in this draft being hosted by WICG, which as far as I can tell is a W3C group.

True, but since the other parties don't really care much, what could we do really? (The other big corps like Apple and Microsoft - and let's say FB because of their WebView browser. Are all also knee-deep into their own walled gardens. Not likely to take standards and consumer protection seriously. Eg. Apple will just laugh and brand itself as the real privacy option - for those who can afford it. And geeks can ultimately just use a fork of Chrome/Chromium if they want.)

How would W3C stop this?

Why do you think the W3C is relevant?

As the article says, ScrollToTextFragment is a W3C spec.

It's not.

But that's besides the point. The W3C haven't been in the driver's seat for a very long time now when it comes to web standards.

Well, not spec, but proposed spec. [1]

Driven by Google, but under the auspices of W3C.

> The W3C haven't been in the driver's seat for a very long time now when it comes to web standards.

That was exactly ghostpepper's point.

[1] https://github.com/WICG/ScrollToTextFragment

The W3C doesn't even try to drive features after one browser has implemented them and other browsers are considering them - that's the job of WHATWG.

We are in violent agreement.

With the risk of falling into a loop:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22386665

At least that has been my understanding of the situation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com