Honestly, do the other 450+ W3C member organizations matter? (https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List)
Well, the four objectors are responsible for browser engines that cover somewhere between 95 and 99+% of browser usage, depending on which set of stats you use and whether you count other browsers that have Chromium or Firefox upstream, including the system browsers of every major mobile and desktop OS.
So, no, in practice if those four agree on something, it is the way the web works.
[1]https://caniuse.com/#feat=canvas
*EDIT I misread the parent. I didn't put the context for that paragraph together and read 'just' as in 'right now' instead of 'just decided to'.
I think what he meant to say was "Remember that Apple just went ahead and implemented the Canvas tag. [without waiting on any standards organisation]"
Prior their implementation, canvas was not a tag that existed, nor supported in any version of HTML at that time, but it was later incorporated into a new version of HTML. Apple was a minor browser developer as well as a minor OS developer and minor system designer at the time.
Given that the W3C charter requires actual implementations in order for a standard to move forward, I'd have to say that no - entities other than those who might produce a significant implementation probably don't matter in this case.
The DOM 4 implementation report, http://w3c.github.io/test-results/dom/details.html, is based on the tests in web-platform-tests: however, the web-platform-tests policy is that we test what browsers implement, and hence the DOM tests there are based on the WHATWG spec: there's no evidence provided that anyone has implemented what the W3C spec says in any case where it differs.
They could matter, if they built a browser with competing market share. It's not a static equilibrium.
EDIT:
To clarify. Who is going to be building their own rendering engine instead of taking an existing one - 3 of the 4 are open source - and building a browser on top?
But creating a rendering engine from scratch is hard and there is no business case for anyone doing it from scratch. Apple didn't (they tried with CyberDog ages ago) they used KHTML to create WebKit. Google didn't either, they started with WebKit. Opera gave up on their own rendering engine years ago.
Further, the W3C's argument historically has been to make the DOM easier to implement from the ground up (XHTML strict) compared to the overall rats nest of HTML5, which, as far as I'm aware, still is not fully supported anywhere [1] and is very loose about document structure errors etc. So, if you're planning to implement the W3C's DOM, it makes sense that you're agreeing at least somewhat with the W3C's historical philosophy about what the web should look like and how it should behave, so you're more likely to be concerned about the implementation difficulty of HTML5.
1a) Why would it matter that Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and/or Apple object to W3C DOM 4.1 if they don't implement it?
1b) Why would Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and/or Apple care enough to object to W3C DOM 4.1 if they aren't implementing it? Why would they even give any effort to a competing specification and just allow it to die from inactivity?
2) Why does what is in W3C DOM 4.1 matter if the high 90s percentage of users are served by a browser in the WHATWG DOM camp? This could probably be condensed down to "Why do W3C's specifications matter at all" really.
It matters to the utility of the W3C DOM spec that it doesn't represent either what browsers have implemented or what they will implement.
> Why would Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and/or Apple care enough to object to W3C DOM 4.1 if they aren't implementing it?
They care enough because they want the W3C, if it is going to write purported web standards, to do something that won't confuse developers and lead to browser vendors fielding complaints from developers who mistake useless W3C documents for something meaningful.
> Why would they even give any effort to a competing specification and just allow it to die from inactivity?
They don't want to have a competing specification, though they do not seem opposed to having a specification with a different focus but consistent with WHATWG to the degree dictate by the purpose.)
> Why does what is in W3C DOM 4.1 matter if the high 90s percentage of users are served by a browser in the WHATWG DOM camp?
The idea is not to have opposing camps, though if W3C insists on making it an opposing camps situation, thst becomes a real issue.
Once upon a time Microsoft had 90% of the browser’s market. We created web standards in order to prevent monopolies, such as the former IExplorer, from holding the market hostage. That’s the whole reason behind web standards.
And yes, they matter even with an IExplorer that has 90% market share, because governments can and do enforce adherence. That’s also the reason for why Microsoft came up with OOXML, ODF being a threat even with a tiny market share.
Governments are not going to force every major browser manufacturer to support a standard.
That's why W3C lost relevance.
HTML5, in large part, was created to do exactly the opposite -- formally set down in writing all the de facto quirks of HTML as actually used, parsed and rendered in the real world, instead of continuing to prescribe behaviors which didn't match observed reality.
We've got no ActiveX, so your claim is false. Mozilla actually could implement ActiveX. They refused to do so.
Also, lets not forget that IExplorer 6 had incompatibilities with the standard, including XMLHttpRequest, even though Microsoft invented it.
Just for the note: I did - https://sciter.com
It was not meant to render all possible pages from Wild World Web but it renders HTML5/CSS3 (some subsets but still).
But the thread is an interesting read.
As if building a competitive browser isn't hard enough. You then have to convince people to use it. Considering the walled gardens 3 of the big 4 are erecting around the platforms the control, that seems neigh impossible.
Yes, they did a lot of innovations there we all use now. Most notable - the whole AJAX idea was born there.
A few years ago I gave a talk on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hneN6aW-d9w . I hope it's not too embarassingly outdated now :)
In particular, unlike the W3C, we do not require membership fees (https://www.w3.org/Consortium/fees?countryCode=US&quarter=04...) for participation.
From what I've read (which is not that much), the relationship between accessibility advocates and web standards has been particularly fraught, with advocates pushing for standards features that are received poorly in the marketplace. The argument here being: not every good idea about HTML is best expressed as a fundamental part of the HTML standard.