There is a potential legitimate role for the two-track approach, if WHATWG represents a moving target of what browser vendors have agreed to implement and essentially is the vehicle for documenting hmthe agreed future common web platform, and W3C presents a versioned publication of the stable, widely implemented, currently usable state at a particular point of time; the W3C version would then be the target for conservative app developers that need something that works everywhere today, the WHATWG standard would be what people making browsers and other user agents would target, and what more ambitious developers willing to deal with “can I use...?” pitfalls would be guided by.
It seems unnecessary to have an entirely separate organization to just copy/paste/publish new "versions" of existing archives.
Because the order of incorporation into the standard and the order of implementation and stabilization aren't the same, and some fesutres may be implemented incompletely in some browsers, so that what is stable and usable is a subset of features (and sometimes a subset of functionality within a particular feature) that doesn't correspond to any particular version of the LS. So you'd need manual curation.
> It seems unnecessary to have an entirely separate organization
Perhaps, though the audience and thus interested parties for the implementor-focussed spec and the developer-focussed spec are different.
Anyway, I agree with the grandparent poster that caniuse.com is a much better approach to documenting the interoperable subset than copying and pasting someone else's spec, and trying to delete the parts that are not interoperable by some threshold. We actually have caniuse.com boxes in the margin of the HTML Standard: see for example https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/scripting.html#attr-s...
Finally, it's worth noting that we only incorporate features into WHATWG Living Standards if they have multiple implementer interest; see https://whatwg.org/working-mode#additions
I just can't see a reason for the W3C to be handling any of this anymore except for money reasons.
Many years ago I tried to get a membership to the W3C as I wanted to provide a voice for a company I worked for (and for myself, honestly) but found out that the lowest level of membership was many thousands of dollars. How can anyone who isn't already very well established ever be properly represented there?
Then you check out WHATWG and, as far as I can tell, there are never fees associated with being a member and participating.
If you need to target specific (probably legacy) browsers, you check caniuse.com. By the way, the WHATWG HTML standard integrates little boxes with caniuse.com data. That is indeed useful to developers.
These people are living in wonderland and need to wake up to the reality that there's already a winner and the war is long over.
As an example, CSS: Google came up with Flexbox, Microsoft came up with Grid.
Now we have two competing layout methods doing pretty much the same. Yet they are conflicting in the sense that define the same flexibility entity by two different means: flexbox uses CSS property (that by itself conflicts with CSS 2.1 box model) and grid uses fr units for defining the same flexibility concept - portion of free space left in container from other fixed elements in it.
Problem is that all browser from now on shall follow this mess.
They're also not competing: flexbox makes many 1D layouts easier than grid does. They're complementary, not conflicting.
Problem is that flexbox ruins CSS box model that mandates that width CSS property is what defines the width of inner box of the element. Now they have flex-basis that if defined in galaxy far, far away overrides that width by something else.
That above already recognized as a mistake: https://wiki.csswg.org/ideas/mistakes
As of that 1D ...
grid-auto-flow: row | column;
makes flexbox obsolete at great extent.
I'm not quite following; may you please explain this? Thanks.
.flex-container {
border: 1px solid #555;
display : flex;
}
.flex-container > span {
display:block;
border: 1px solid #900;
flex:1;
width:100px;
}
<div class="flex-container">
<span>Foo</span>
<span>Bar</span>
</div>
For example?
Grid is great, and now works in most places, but it was good to have flexbox while grid was still in process; it only became available in Edge, in the final form, late last year, making it now available on all major browsers.
You're always going to have cases like this; where there's something that's simple that works now, and something better that comes later. If you always wait for the better one, it will take forever for things to get done. Not to mention that flexbox is probably simpler and easier to understand and use for some of the simple use cases, so people will still probably continue to use it despite the fact that grid is available.
In normal architectural process we would establish first common infrastructure for all layout methods.
I've proposed something like that 9 years ago: https://www.terrainformatica.com/w3/flex-layout/flex-layout.... but it didn't go through (Who am I and who are browser vendors?)
So we would have single property that defines layout methods:
display:block;
flow: horizontal; // flexbox now
flow: vertical; // ditto
flow: grid(
rows: ...,
columns: ...
); // grid
flow: multi-column( columns: ... ); // current multi-col
flow: stack;
flow: row(label,input); // variant of grid
Note that each layout method has its own parameters in their own namespaces.
Currently set of CSS properties is about 400 in one flat namespace. Any junior architect will tell you that this is close to unmanageable state. But we still pushing new stuff on that x'mas tree. It will fall down by its own weight as some moment, but who cares ...
W3C/TBL had “owned” HTML and DOM for way too long to just acknowledge that they botched it and that their work on that has no practical relevance any more.
“We are the organization that provides infrastructure for the standardization of stylesheets, and also some awesome-in-theory semantic web standards that are too complicated for actual implementations, and also some XML standards that are actually relevant for DTP” doesn’t seem to be the mission statement of choice for the creator of the web.
The W3C is very well funded and they don't wanna see the money gone.