Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not a Google engineer, but this doesn't feel like an "Are we the baddies" moment to me: giving a small group within the W3C the ability to block any technical proposal — including from the article what seems to be as far-reaching as all existing IoT proposals — feels like it strips the W3C of what little utility it has left. If the W3C mandates that everyone has to stop making IoT stuff, it seems unlikely that Google (or anyone else) would stop... Presumably the only thing that would stop would be meaningful W3C discussions about the proposals before they get shipped and become de facto standards, leading to an ever more siloed, fractured web.

W3C has repeatedly shot itself in the foot with sweeping mandates that major vendors oppose and which are then ignored; that's the reason we now have the separate WHATWG org and the reason W3C no longer leads much in terms of browser standards. Adding more mandates from tiny players (e.g. Brave) doesn't feel super useful, even if the group is supposedly focused on privacy — although the article even notes that at least part of the desire of the group was for "rivals to limit or handicap the ability of Google to compete against them."

> it strips the W3C of what little utility it has left

You hit on it right there. There is no more such a thing as "web standards" that the W3C can agree on and push forward. There are "web standards" that Google wants and that's it. If the W3C ratifies them, great. But really it doesn't matter at all.

That happened way before google came on the scene. W3C has never been a particularly effective standards body (rip XHTML). WHATWG didn't just appear from the void for no reason.

That said, its a standards body. If you arent standardizing what the majority of the marketshare web browser vendors want, you're not creating standards, just pipe dreams. Consensus is what a standard is. It is not the same thing as regulation.

Back when WHATWG was organized, I thought similarly. But in retrospect, it was a mistake. W3C moved slowly, yes - but the result was an actual standard. Now, it's a target moving so fast, and with so many evolutionary dead ends, that we're back to the days of "this site is best viewed in ...".

Google profits from this in two ways. Because they own the largest browser by market share, the ... is usually that, making other browsers less viable. But in addition to that, this significantly raised the barrier to entry for any competing browsers - remember what happened to Edge?

> but the result was an actual standard

Was it though? At a minimum i think a "standard" is a document detailing the behaviour of at least two competiting implementations sufficiently that you could use it to make a new implementation that was interopable. I don't think that was true of W3C standards in the pre WHATWG days. Compare it to say the HTTP rfcs, which i think did meet that standard.

Not necessarily. The C++ standards committee for instance happily standardizes features with only one (or zero) existing implementations.

It has to, because such implementations would be extensions that standard compliant code can't rely on.

Opera would be a good example of a third independent implementation successfully competing with the primary two (IE and NN/Mozilla). I remember switching browsers back and forth several times back then - I was an Opera 6 user, then moved to Firebird/Firefox shortly after it was released, then back to Opera 7/8/9, then to Chrome.

It was a fairly brief period, unfortunately - roughly between IE losing definitive market dominance, and Chrome acquiring the same.

Not quite accurate - Google is not the only party in this. Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft and Google formed their own group (WHATWG) that effectively took over the development of a number of standards - HTML and DOM included [0] - and follow and implement those, with W3 ratifying them ex post facto (or not, who cares?).

Google definitely plays a big role in this, but the others should not be left off the hook.

[0] https://spec.whatwg.org/

Perhaps it is time to start a new, grassroots replacement for the W3C.

What possible good would that do? The vendors' opinions are those that matter. You can write whatever you want and call it a web standard. That doesn't mean anyone is going to implement it or obey it.

Exactly. The W3C is an industry standards group, not a regulatory body. Trying to pretend otherwise (as this proposal did) seems not only pointless, but also antithetical to the purpose of the organization.

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