Hixie

The "they" that "gave up" is a different group of people than the "they" who thought it was evil, by the way.

The current group working on the contemporary HTML living standard just describes reality, by and large, so there was never really any doubt that "embed" would be part of the standard when we started back in 2004.

HTML is a living standard and was last updated yesterday:

   http://whatwg.org/html

The W3C Recommendation process is obsolete.

Isn't GMail a sufficiently powerful "private messaging" feature? You can send a message from anyone's profile if they've enabled the "Send mail" feature. Plus GMail already supports a federated protocol, so you can use this profile "send message" feature with any other mail system you want.

Yeah that's weird. I don't understand how that happened. If anyone happens to have IE2 around I'd love to be able to study this.

You can have a well-defined spec that's easy to understand without having to shoe-horn your API into HTTP's document-orientated semantics.

Sure.

<video ontimeupdate="sendXHR(currentTime)" src="myvideo" controls></video>

...where "sendXHR()" is a five- to ten-line wrapper around XMLHttpRequest.

There's a ton of specs lacking editors. If you have anyone who can take over, let me know. We've been looking.

...and by "open" I mean anyone can join, contribute, and have a significant impact on the spec. The spec's development has been based on rational debate and research. If someone has a different vision, though, they are welcome to create a new spec, just like we did with the WHATWG when we disagreed with the W3C's vision.

What's wrong with just "HTML"?

I'm not sure what you mean by "<canvas> and friends" or what you meant by "HTML5" before.

Well we could have stopped progressing without renaming the spec. You have to make sure we keep improving the Web, and if we don't, take over! That's what we did to the W3C when they stopped, after all.

(You can also join us. See http://whatwg.org/ for details. It's basically an open community.)

You don't have to work at Google to ask me a question. Just mail me (ian@hixie.ch), I'm quite happy to help people out. Just make sure you read the relevant spec first, since that's where I'll be pointing you (whether you work at Google or not) if it contains the answer to your question.

edit: Or as someone else pointed out, ask on IRC. The #whatwg channel on Freenode is where I mainly hang out.

The implementors _are_ the working group. Standards organisations don't make up standards without the implementors. :-) (At least, not successfully. Some do try.)

Secret working groups aren't secret from the participants, so it wouldn't make any difference to the case you describe. Indeed, the 802.11 working group _does_ work in secret, yet still had the "debacle" you mention. (The IEEE as a whole is not a very open standards organisation.)

Also, hardware standards are a bit more difficult, but in software, you really want to have experimental implementations long before standardisation. Otherwise, you end up with technologies that really don't work so well in practice. But that's separate from the issue of secrecy.

The standards community is like this too. Just consider how many W3C working groups are secret, for example. You wouldn't believe how much push-back I get when I ask for everything to be public.

(The W3C even has a second level of secrecy known as "team", which even W3C members who pay $60,000+ every year don't get access to.)

I love how the author uses omitted-</p> as their example, when that's one of the things that was actually already defined in HTML4 and isn't a syntax error.

<video> isn't ready yet because the implementations are very young, and they still have pretty basic bugs. We don't yet have a good comprehensive test suite for the API, and the API in fact is still in active flux (I'm literally changing parts of the API as we speak -- I have an incomplete edit that changes how the timed track API works that I'm still working on). And of course there's the issue of the codec, which is still unresolved.

Deploying a site with <video> and Flash is twice as much testing, implementation, and encoding cost as just <video> or just Flash.

Using <video> today (late 2010) is fine for experimental purposes, demos, or for people who are on the bleeding edge. But for mainstream sites who need to reach even people who use IE6, or who don't have much in the way of resources to spend on this kind of stuff, or who simply aren't interested in being the pioneers of new Web technology, then I wouldn't recommend using it yet.

This kind of stuff moves really quite fast, though. Six, twelve months from now? Who knows. Maybe it'll be deployed widely enough and with good enough quality of implementations that using a proprietary plug-in for video will seem positively anachronistic.

To be fair, <video> is hardly ready for mainstream use yet.

Seems to me you care quite a lot!

The W3C didn't kill it, it was Mozilla and Microsoft who decided they didn't want to implement it (for a variety of reasonable reasons) and me who decided to not continue working on a spec that didn't have all the browser vendors on board.

The airlines are clearly not ensuring that anything is perfect quality.

Good.

Or rent a car, for some reason.

That convention drives me batty. So much time wasted when trying to copy-and-paste those URLs.

30 minutes is less time than I've spent actually entering the country through that same airport.

Can't speak for everywhere, but from a British point of view, it's probably the opposite. Personally I basically only use Sir when I'm telling a stranger off. I guess it depends a lot on the tone of voice used. :-)

Hear hear.

If you're using HTTPS, the Referer is blocked by your browser.

Anyone who's been following this stuff knows that my opinion on microdata is only barely above my opinion of RDFa, so saying that I'm biased on this is pretty silly. I'd be perfectly happy to see both features die, I think they're both pretty silly! Unfortunately, people have put forward a number of use cases that they want addressed, so we apparently need _some_ solution, and if we're going to have one I'd rather it not be the waaaay over-complicated RDFa.

Re the second bit: describing the WHATWG as "opaque" is pretty silly, given how radically open it is.

(PS. Hickson, not Hixon.)

No idea what the "real story" is here, or if there is one beyond what they've said. There's no patent review issue here, though, since the canvas stuff has already been published as FPWD by the W3C HTML working group in the HTML5 spec itself. Thus Adobe is already bound by the patent policy on this stuff.

All of Apple's objections were public. (Also, Mozilla's objections to H.264, Google's opinion, Opera's position, Nokia's position, etc. They were all public.)

There _have_ been some private discussions between various people interested in solving the codec problem, but they have yet to bear useful fruit and the spec was unaffected by them. All the objections that affected the spec were public from the get-go.