Hacker News Reader

Comment by gioele | Hacker News Reader

«All of which leaves just one question: what has the W3C ever done for us?»

It has given us good specs fixed in stone you could develop against and be sure that your code could still work in the next decade, thing XML or XSLT. Stable specs are also good for legislators and regulators, for they have the ability to pinpoint names and versions like "The minimum accessibility level for public websites is WCAG 2.0 level AA" instead of "all public websites must have a minimum level of accessibility".

We can debate whether the W3C model is good for a spec like HTML that is subject to so many business interests, but what standardisation model has been good for many other specs.

View on HN

"It has given us good specs fixed in stone you could develop against and be sure that your code could still work in the next decade"

A lot of the W3C specs are actually so poorly specified that none of the browsers can even figure out how to implement them. E.g. in CSS the width of a pixel is defined relative to the length of each user's arm.

> CSS the width of a pixel is defined relative to the length of each user's arm.

I had to see this for myself to believe it.

"The reference pixel is the visual angle of one pixel on a device with a pixel density of 96dpi and a distance from the reader of an arm's length. For a nominal arm's length of 28 inches, the visual angle is therefore about 0.0213 degrees. For reading at arm's length, 1px thus corresponds to about 0.26 mm (1/96 inch)."

Source: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-values/

Seriously, it's pretty messed up. Maybe IE6 didn't actually have a float drop error, it's just that my arms were too fucking long.

Once upon a time the W3C site pointed out that they did not define standards. They offered recommendations with the idea that people would implement them, see what worked (or didn't), and at some point a standards body (ISO, ECMA) would issue the actual standard.

However, so many people keep referring to W3C recommendations as standards (mostly as a way to brow-beat people into following one or another preferred practice) that the W3C changed their tune and decided to go along for the ride.

Instead of seeing W3C TRs as the last word we would be better served if people viewed them as (likely) incomplete works-in-progress on the way to ironing out well-defined standards.

relative to the length of each user's arm

It's easy to snidely dismiss that idea, but seriously, how would you define a unit of length in an environment that is supposed to translate between multiple devices and media types? A "pixel" makes little sense when drawing on a sheet of paper or a super-high DPI screen where pixels aren't individually visible. It can't be a fixed real-world distance, because pixels would sensibly be larger at movie-screen distance than at arms' length. They basically defined it in terms of the arc-length of the picture upon your eye, which is completely reasonable to me.

I don't think they should use the word pixel to describe something that they're clearly defining as not an actual pixel.

Actually, for something that is going to be fixed in stone, using units based on the length of the arm has a lot of historical precedent. See, for instance, the great buildings of ancient Egypt.

Yes, but apart from good specs fixed in stone, XML, XSLT and WCAG, what have the W3C ever done for us?

(It was a Monty Python reference.)

Specs are good, but they really aren't quite fixed in stone, things reach and then leave rec status. CSS 2.1 spent like 13 years going in and out of different statuses and only very recently appears to have been "completed".

But which shoe should developers follow?

Yes, W3C is good for having set-in-stone specs 5 years after they've ceased to be relevant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com