W3C re-launched as a public-interest non-profit organization

$17/month for netflix is great when you have an income. As a poor student, that’s $17 I can save.

Much like DVD region locking, the majority of the population doesn't care, and those who do are capable of overcoming the DRM anyway, but the latter is illegal, and leaves no room at all for people who want to comply with the law but not with Google's device mandates.

Maybe Netflix is a good value if your primary goal is to have an endless stream of content to watch and you don't really care what it is. But if you watch TV less frequently, it's absolutely terrible value. And if you want to choose what series to watch rather than which streaming service to watch, the constant switching between streaming services is terribly tedious, and another source of increased cost if your interests don't change perfectly aligned with billing periods.

I know someone who just wants to have copies of all movies and TV shows. He spends way more effort on keeping up his storage array and downloading things then he does enjoying the movies. But for every one of him there are 10,000 regular paying consumers. Is he worth worrying about?

In terms of convenience DRM doesn't change a thing, because from the consumer's perspective it's all there on a torrent site, there's no way to even know if something had DRM unless you look it up specifically.

FYI, widevine is not open source.

Even if that's the case, that's not an issue of DRM, that's an issue of distribution.

It's also just flat out not true. Sure, some of the 4k HDR content might originate from PTP/BTN/scene/w.e., but it's readily available on e.g. RARBG.

a) Copyright infringement is not theft.

b) Copyright holders do not own the content, they hold a temporary monopoly over it.

Not a lot of people are calling WHATWG a bad standards body, but it is even worse at taking stuff directly out of Blink research and labeling it a draft standard with only a single implementation with sometimes seemingly very little study into its safety or long-term viability.

I suppose there is a small distinction between Ivory Tower academic aspirations and research versus Walled Garden corporate aspirations and research, but at the end of the day it certainly feels the same, and I have more reasons, myself, to admire the academic aspirations that aren't tied to corporate interests and profit motives, but I can understand why some feel what Google and WHATWG is doing is better for the web because they start with that first "implementation" of their research instead of a chalkboard and a hope for a better web.

You seem to think standards should only be built in reverse, which is essentially the WHATWG philosophy: Browser vendors implement something they think is useful, then try to negotiate to get it standardized. That's not bad per se, but it's limited and it's a different system of accountability.

We still don't know if it would have gotten more backwards compatible had browsers tried to actually implement it.

Similarly, you can’t have an HTML content generator that would guarantee that its output conforms to HTML x.y, and thus could be used to produce content for the viewer component.

The only thing that the respective providers of the viewer component and of the content generator could do is to provide a copy of a snapshot of the “living standard” to express which revision they support. But since there are no named/numbered versions, that’s not very practical, and it makes it hard to determine compatibility between such software modules.

This is what the “living standard” fails at, as a standard.

As pointed out elsethread, it also fails by leaving a lot unspecified.

Newer algorithms like flexbox have a formal algorithm with minor undefined details documented.

The entire box model has no normative processing standard. It basically tells implementors, "Well, it should look like this, but you know if you want to do something different, that's fine. We don't tell you how to process glyphs or lines, so figure it out."

Let me put it this way: there is no such thing as a collection of web standards that you can read today and implement a visually similar output to mainstream evergreen browsers. They don't exist. It's a farce, a lie, an illusion. However, you want to articulate it, there it is.

Some subsets are formally defined and provide an actual algorithm you can implement, others describe an output with no processing model, further some standards exist which implicitly require that an undefined formal processing model exists.

You MUST read existing web browser codebases and their explicit comments which specifically say things like, "This is what WebKit/Blink/Gecko/Quantum does, so we do it here, too," in order to create a web browser that does something similar.

It can be as basic as line processing to as nuanced as box shadow processing, or as complex as how subtrees affect framebuffers. Yes, there are CSS properties dedicated to altering the implementation level details of a CSS processing model that doesn't formally exist.

I know this specifically because I wrote a compositor that conforms to a subset of CSS 2.1 and additional CSS Modules.

I STILL don't know how one writes a performant compositor today because what you're supposed to do is write one with a tile-based rasterizer and virtualized graphics commands.

You can't just rasterize subtrees to framebuffers because the calculated CSS may result in dimensions larger than what your hardware can support for backing layers.

Try finding that in the CSS standards.

HTML parsing may have a formal standard now, I've never read it, but the fundamental truth is that it didn't matter if one existed anyway. There was no such thing as a conforming HTML parser prior to then, so what implementors did was read how other web browsers parsed HTML, because that was what users and developers expected, so that was the "true" standard.

This problem still exists today, just in other places.

There are also NO REAL TESTS. There are some manual, human-based, use-your-eyeballs web browser tests that exist, but you can't use them, because they rely on circular logic.

You can't test a web browser by referencing some ground truth that is produced by the web browser when you're testing the exact features that generate said "ground truth."

It's also impossible by definition to test browser rendered output because the output is implementation specific. There's no comparing output to a reference rasterization, because now you're dependent on properties that in the specification are left to the implementor to decide what they want to do.

There are really three independent things in play:

- DTD's define a set of valid elements and attributes.

- Quirks/standards rendering modes affect how CSS is rendered.

- The HTML/XHTML divide is about the low-level HTML syntax and how invalid syntax should be handled.

These are all independent concerns since CSS operates on the parsed tree of elements and doesn't care about lexical syntax or DTD's.

XHTML did not attempt to address the quirks/standards mode issues at all, since this is the domain of CSS.

Wouldn't that include disadvantages for the users? Plugins are usually a black box, working independent and lacking any way for customizing. The solution now is narrow enough that customization is possible for users on the harmless parts, without touching the DRM-part. By which I mean things like play-settings, the interface, behavior. There are many different types of extensions for changing the user experience on Netflix and such, stuff which did not exist for Flash&Co.

EME unblocked killing Flash and made the web more secure.

I thought it was a good case study in how somebody who is worried about corporate power when it affects the workplace or foreign policy can be indifferent to corporate power over technology. My friend Harel and I felt pretty firmly that a web based on open standards was going to be good for 'ordinary people' having venues for self-expression. I think Mike Albert's viewpoint is closer to the mainstream though, where most people perceive ease-of-use as more 'liberating' than personal control, like that 1984 ad by Apple.

Today I think it is funny because I like animation-heavy interfaces in video games and think, hypothetically, it would be nice to see some more of that on the web, but I develop a lot of 'intranet' applications that consistently avoid the SPA boondoggle where the one thing I really can't do is animate transitions. I guess I could use HTMX and push the animations out to a 'frame' around the 'pages' that get loaded but that is unappealing to me because I'd like to have completely integrated animations and not a library of dissolves, fades, wipes and loading indicators that are much less necessary if you are loading a 25k 'screen' as opposed to 2.5 MB of Javascript.