Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

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You’re assuming XHTML1.1 would never have evolved further, never have gotten more content.

And Flash, despite its flaws, would have been a much better starting point for rich content than the ecosystem we have today.

Many of the features Flash provided are only available in browsers today through babel.js transpilation. As result, we’re stuck with a language without stdlib and broken syntax.

We’re stuck with a document model that’s impossible to work with or parse, and with impossible layout management.

If you want web applications, it’d make much more sense to port the Android layout XML format to the web than to attempt to use HTML5 for it, because HTML5 is insanity for building applications.

> and all the web apps would be desktop applications

I don’t see that as anything bad.

The web is for documents, and lightly interactive content. All the rich applications on the web are opaque to any crawler I could write anyway, as I just get "You need JS to view this React app". Desktop applications would be just as parseable, except they would also be less of a resource hog.

The idea that standards groups exist to push for top-down reconcepting of how the world should work is a common one, and is also a good reason why standards groups fail. Your idea of what the best outcome is won't be the same as every other stakeholders, and no one stakeholder will have exactly the same idea of the best outcome as the market will.

Ultimately, the market will win, no matter what your standards group says.

The point of standards is interoperability, not rationalization. When standards groups try to rationalize technologies real people work with, they cease to provide value, and instead become obstacles that real engineers end up laboriously working around.

When I was a child in elementary school, a standards committee decided to change my native language.

They replaced the spelling of most words, and many grammatical rules.

We were forced to obey these changes, any use of the old rules was counted as mistake in school.

Back then, many older books were still using the old rules.

By the time I left high school, almost no books with the old rules were left. All had been reprinted. All newspapers had switched. Autocorrect programs had been updated with the new rules as well.

In a matter of 8 years, an entire language had changed its orthography and parts of its grammar, top-down, and it worked out fine.

I’m sorry, if an entire human language with 120 million speakers can be updated top-down like that, a web spec can as well.

That sounds horrible.

It was amazing. The new orthography is much simpler, and has far fewer insane rules or exceptions. And most people that have seen the transition, but were born after it, or went to school during it, agree.

I know it can work on this scale, I’ve seen it IRL. Many languages do stuff like this, German has the council of German language, and French has their Academy.

You can do the same on the web. You just need to have all vendors working together to actually do it.

The idea that a bunch of standards group officials can decide for the world that web pages are simply lightweight content publishing mechanisms and that real applications should be build exclusively in Flash and that that worldview can be ratified and mandated by browser vendors does not seem amazing to me.

At any rate: the Internet is a market system, not a top-down autocracy.

The alternative (and current reality) is that the same things are decided by about four companies in an entirely intransparent manner.

At least the W3C had processes and a wide array of members.

Isn't that just theater? None of them can tell Apple and Google what to put in their browsers; in fact, if they can't convince just one of the big 4 browser vendors to do something, their standards have no meaning at all.

It's even more work than that-- check out caniuse for SVG fonts:

https://caniuse.com/#feat=svg-fonts

They had support in both Safari and Chrome, but never in FF or IE (nor Edge). Chrome eventually dropped the support.

So I'd say if you can't get all four to implement the feature then you might as well call that part of your spec a "living standard." Those features are going to get way fewer eyeballs, fewer bugfixes, fewer reviews, fewer pieces of documentation, etc.

Uh, WHATWG is an open process - they have a similar level of control over things that W3C had.

If you want to try and claim W3C ever had the power to enforce people following their specs, IE6 would like to have a word.

The Internet is a network. The web is an oligopoly. Google, Google-by-proxy, and Apple fill the dog bowl, and the rest of us eat from it because it is there.

If you‘re talking about German, it was not amazing, but a cultural catastrophe, and an extra-legal totalitarian nightmare.

I assume you’re older than 22? There’s pretty much a strict split at around that age. People older seem to consistently hate it, people younger seem to consistently like it, because the new rules are much simpler.

Previously, Gruß and Kuß had no info about how long to pronounce the u – Gruß and Kuss do. And until 2017, capitalizing them into GRUSS and KUSS lost this information, now GRUẞ and KUSS keep it.

Previously, for many words, the rules when to split the word, when to write them together, when to use – was insanity. Now it’s all in a few easy rules.

And you have to remember, this wasn’t the first time German went through such changes – ever since the advent of the printing press, when a written German language was basically "invented" from the many dialects that existed, until today, there have been proponents of a prescriptive language evolution, and they’ve had lots of influence over time.

When you use Tarnen, Verfasser, or Absender, Abstand, Bücherei, Augenblick, Leidenschaft, Entwurf or Briefwechsel, Rechtschreibung or Tagebuch, Grundlage, Altertum, Erdgeschoss, tatsächlich or Hochschule, all these words were defined top-down. (All these words are just from Philipp von Zesen, Christian Wolff, and Joachim Heinrich Campe)

A massive amount of what we consider "German" today was defined and changed top-down, and without these changes, German wouldn’t be recognizable.

You‘re misinformed.

Yes, the German language has had several big changes, but until the reform we‘re talking about it was linguistically „proper“ in that the existing language was described and codified. It was bottom up.

In this reform some non-elected people (who just a few years earlier had said themselves that there job wasn‘t to invent German, but to describe existing use and trends) invented a whole new orthography from scratch. The new rules have never been in use anywhere throughout the German-speaking lands.

They were and are pure fiction.

In linguistics that‘s how you tell a layperson: they think linguistics is proscriptive. Now it seems to be... :-(

And of course people under 22 don‘t care. They have never learned proper German.

You mean, just like in many other languages? According to Wikipedia, French, Icelanding, Spanish, Swedish, and a few more have had varying degrees of prescriptive language standardization.

> Yes, the German language has had several big changes, but until the reform we‘re talking about it was linguistically „proper“ in that the existing language was described and codified. It was bottom up.

I just explained why that wasn’t the case. Many linguists in the past have intentionally invented words (see the ones I mentioned) to make the language simpler, and stricter.

And the same continued until today – the drug store chain Rossmann has been a constant supporter of linguistic prescriptivism, has sponsored groups supporting it, and has been using these concepts in all their published material as well. Many other companies engaged in this as well.

The language has never been defined by the people speaking it, but always by the journalists writing it, the linguists describing it, and the companies influencing it.

And German as a whole was created, as pure fiction, by people trying to publish books across the whole of Germany at a time when everyone spoke local dialects.

At no time has German ever been a bottom-up language – and if we already let our language be influenced and shaped by companies, by media – why not at least use similar influence to make it simpler?

Having a language be simple to use is more important than some fake emotional value of being "natural".

You simply don't understand what I have written. I think we can leave it here.

I don't care about your opinion that it's "fake" and "emotional".

Language is a core part of my being, and a fascist power-grab killing my mother tongue is simply a crime against humanity. It's no different from how the Turks have been treating the Kurdish language.

I have only weak hope, but still hope, that we can someday reverse this. Violently or non-violently.

Do you believe languages are meant to live forever?

But it worked.

I am not sure if this is still the case today, but I remember that not too long after the new orthography / grammar rules were passed, two major news publishers announced that they would return to the old rules.

Also, my sister is a linguist, and I can trigger her going on a long rant just by mentioning the Rechtschreibreform. ;-)

(Personally, I think some of the new orthography rules are much simpler and consistent, so I use them. The rest I basically ignore, unless a spellchecker nags me about it.)

What language is this? This sounds fascinating.

My example was the implementation of the German orthography and language reforms between 1996 and 2006 (I went to elementary school in 2002, when implementing it was still in progress, and most stuff was still using the old spelling, I left high school in 2014).

But French has their Academy, which has even more power over language, and afaik, Spain supposedly has similar governing bodies.

Meh- the French Academy has power over prescriptive grammar sure, but it has almost no power over what descriptive linguistics finds. Lots of Arabic and Verlan has made its way into everyday parlance.

I'm not really sure that the French Academy is really that much more effective than Strunk & White is for English speakers. It primarily seems to be ceremonial / an expression of French pride.

If you want a more tech-related example, Jobs said "no flash on iPhones", and in a few years... poof! no flash.

The counter to that is pretty obvious, because if you remember Jobs also said "no native apps on iPhones", and then in a few months... poof! an app store.

Flash was pretty much dead anyway, and the web platform had advanced enough to mostly replace it at that point. That wasn't true for native apps.

If you want to make a standard, it has to let people do the things they want to do. Otherwise, people will just use a different (or no) standard.

I'm not really getting into the standards thing here--just throwing some ammo to the underdog.

My only point is that there are only a handful of companies with the cash, the talent, and the inclination to tackle these things, and most of them are near if not total monopolies, so as long as what they put out there isn't a blatant kick-in-the-nuts, most of us will just accept it.

iPhone was a compelling product, didn't have flash, everyone migrated to Javascript ASAP. Google is practically a monopoly, and when webmaster tools tells people to jump, watch everyone piss away a weekend to add microformats and shave 5% off of a few 40k images.

Serfs. We are all serfs.

Apples and oranges - when you introduce a government mandate, you remove the market. @tptacek's aregument is clearly about market forces in publicly defined standards, not government enforced ones.

I'm pretty sure the last thing anyone really wants is what we'd wind up with if web standards were left to government dictates...

There’s no need for a government to enforce standards on the web – there’s already an oligopoly that can do it on their own.

In fact, there’s a single company that can just outright dictate web standards, because they hold almost 70% of the browser market: Google.

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