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Comment by rhacker | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't the whole point of WHATG to not focus on the browser / specific implementations, but on the standards? I mean it was a ploy to dethrone IE. Just because IE has been dethroned, doesn't mean the purpose of the group should stagnate. I think at this point they feel justified because they defunded Mozilla. The FEDS absolutely need to break up Google.

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W3C focused on design by committee, de jure standards. WHATWG focuses on standardizing de facto standards. W3C’s HTML effort failed and now its HTML5 spec redirects to WHATWG’s HTML5 spec. Maybe I misunderstood your comment, but sounds like you got it backwards.

On the contrary, i think the point of whatwg was to focus on reality and make descriptive standards instead of making prescriptive standards like the w3c that nobody implemented.

Pushing xpath (or anything else) despite vendors not wanting it is a step in the opposite direction.

What's the point of a standard if no one adopts it?

Conversely, what is the point of a standard that just documents what 2 out of 3 multi-billion companies want to do anyway?

It ensures that they do it the same way

Unless they disagree. Then they “standardize” both ways and the rest of us just have to cope.

What do you think standards are?

Documenting the commonalities between implementations in order to gain interopability, is precisely the point of a standard.

> Conversely, what is the point of a standard that just documents what 2 out of 3 multi-billion companies want to do anyway?

Because it provides a fixed target that can be targeted with confidence by both developers and also the makers of any alternative browser (of which about 4 are still listed in global browser market share statistics).

Those who complain that right now the browser market is dominated by a couple of players seem to be entirely oblivious to history.

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