The Web as the ultimate tool of resilience for the world
w3.org
w3.org
The actual argument is that the W3C has absolutely zero teeth because they couldn’t stop EME even if they wanted to and therefore are irrelevant compared to WHATWG.
The spec contains diagrams and descriptions that have been acknowledged by its authors to be factually incorrect. EME pretends to be an in-browser thing, rather than hardware+kernel "hard" DRM. The spec proponents stated that they'll never use the scheme in the spec, and the "hard" DRM is the key feature they're after.
There have been a lot of process shenanigans: e.g. during likely the biggest disagreement in the history of W3C, the chair of the HTML WG announced that there is a consensus in the group about EME, and it can proceed further. Then the EME part has been moved out of public HTML WG to a closed-doors group.
So it wasn't merely Google+Netflix saying "we'll do it anyway". It was a subversion and corruption of the W3C itself.
If I need to build an HTML parser in a world with proprietary CDM, I sure as hell prefer that CDM to declare itself in a standardized way than to have my parser need to handle non-standardized content declarations. Having a standard benefits even user agents that don't plan to support the feature.
The spec, both for browser developers and site authors, is completely impossible to use without a secret unspecified component. EME CDM isn't even a real component, but a spec placeholder for arbitrary vendor-specific code that has no standard API, and intentionally never will.
That secret component is for all practical purposes absolutely necessary and implements 99% of the functionality. The only key exchange scheme described in EME is a deliberate misdirection, and it's not used by anyone.
I can't emphasize enough how sleazy EME is. Google and Netflix have devised and documented a key exchange scheme nobody asked for, nobody uses, and even they have explicitly said they will never use it. The only purpose of this spec is to merely exist, so that DRM vendors like Google can exploit the confusion to say their closed proprietary DRM, which is not in the spec, and doesn't even work the way spec describes DRMs, is somehow a standard.
(I was an Invited Expert in W3C HTML Working Group when this spec was being written)
How are you supporting them?
Let's begin with a polite thank you for your service, a hot drink, maybe some type of certificate of acknowledgment that says like "you were present." and then call it day.
But beyond that, in my opinion, W3C has been a disaster since day 1. It seems like some people with good intentions decided one day they could just play RFC roulette and maybe if they slipped enough nonsense into their content that nobody would notice, and we would just all play along and build the misshapen web they were imagining.
Right, this is my point, the W3C just seems to make it up as they go along and pick and choose.
Have you ever looked at your genome? It’s jammed full of old stuff tucked away in case it turns out to be useful someday.
Maybe if they had met us halfway and actually shown us the web they were imagining somewhere somehow it might have been easier to get on board, but whenever I tried to look at any of their standards, it was just endless detail with no explanation of why anybody would want to do any of this.
The "Web" is what Google decides it to be - what new APIs to add to Chrome, what protocols to use (HTTP/2, HTTP/3) to access it.
Large players come and go. Chrome is at the head now because MS rested on their laurels and IE's performance rotted enough for a new player to take them on in market-share.
Edge (Legacy) was a decent browser, but keeping up even with still missing Web APIs proved too expensive (alongside fixing bugs). Safari may be in the same pickle these days with apparently a sizeable backlog of missing features and incompatible implementations. Granted, that may also be due to many developers assuming Chrome to be a reference implementation.
If a new player comes along I'd guess it will be based on Blink, but they would probably need more resources than Google can throw at Chrome. And a way to finance them ... there's probably too few people willing to pay for a browser these days.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-st...
https://web.archive.org/web/20150611210558/https://www.bloom...
It didn't blow up overnight, it was more like 3-4 years, but it was meteoric compared to what we were used to
IIRC a few years ago W3C essentially handed over web standards to WHATWG, with the thinking being that it wasn't helpful to have 2 competing standards.
The three largest tech companies own the internet standards? That's quite unsettling.
They also do non-web stuff that happens to use web standards, for example ePub3.
Whatever W3C does and with due respect to TBL, as a self-proclaimed standardization body they've failed spectacularly to keep "browsers vendors" at bay and the web from being monopolized, and I think they should disband, if only to demonstrate to the world that the web isn't "standardized" in any meaningful sense of that word. Even HNers frequently have illusions about "web standards".
While on the way out, they might attempt to deliver CSS specs actually useful for developing browsers. Or maybe they want to venture into developing a browser themselves using their funds?
They may still "control" css and xml (not sure the exhaustive list) but I don't understand why those haven't been moved to WHATWG as well.
Including all the censorship enabled.
The web architecture made it trivial to manipulate information and cancel people. Nothing in the protocols deals with archiving or true redundancy. Nothing deals with DDoS or bypassing censorship. The architecture itself encourages centralization. Moreover, the protocols are currently being manipulated to encourage even more central control.
We're way past the point where expressing sentiments like "this is for everyone" is aspirational. Right now it's merely out of touch and tone-deaf.
Back in the early days, people used to say "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". That may have even been true back then. Definitely not true any more, at least not of the internet as we know it.