RIP W3C's HTML working group 1994-2024
w3.org
w3.org
Worth noting is that privacy concerns related to the reporting and other APIs were what was preventing the last considered WHATWG HTML Review Draft (published January, 2022) to become a recommendation, and change in HTML's so-called outlining (a holdout of Ian Hickson's vision for HTML that was never implemented in browsers and accessibility tech). Even though Steve Faulkner took it upon himself to remove outlining in upstream WHATWG specs, now no W3C recommendation is representing a modern HTML language without outlining. [1] makes the point that, arguably, its removal would've warranted a major version bump ("HTML 6") anyway, considering outlining has been formally part of "HTML 5" for the longest time.
The W3C was not, for instance, a useful bastion against things like DRM, because they approved the EME DRM mechanism. And they weren't doing new web innovation that people wanted. So what purpose did they serve?
https://blog.whatwg.org/drm-and-web-security
So what purpose did the W3C serve? Transforming user agents into entertainment industry agents, I guess.
To name a few: Google, Microsoft, Netflix.
I predicted serious issues with this ages ago, to the point that I suggested the best thing for humankind would be a fork of the HTML spec on behest of WHATWG. I also remember some long time independent contributors like Anne van Kesteren agreeing to this at the time.
Also:
https://theoutline.com/post/2304/netflix-microsoft-and-googl... (2017!)
> The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (Fred Brooks)
The W3C HTML working group was even further removed from users, imagining castles but then delegating the building to others.
They got too lost in the sauce with what was essentially an academic exercise that didn't really benefit the end user.
No, imposing structure onto markup using DTDs had always been a useful and elegant technique.
What W3C was busy with after subsetting XML from SGML as a canonical subset not requiring markup declarations/DTDs for mere parsing (which while useful was already possible and practiced using SGML profiles) is inventing ill-conceived modularization and meta conventions (namespaces, xsi, xinclude), entirely new schema and transformation/query languages, unrealistic and unproven design-by-comittee formatting and browser interactivity systems, and enormous enterprise messaging system ecosystems.
And yes, semantic web stuff; graph DBs were a love affair of TBL's predating even the web (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENQUIRE).
Maybe, but who does it benefit? What is the outcome for people using the web? How were the developers making websites benefiting? It wasn't a bad effort but it was focusing on something that didn't actually solve the biggest problems with the web. XHTML wasn't built for anyone real, it was built for an idealistic outcome.
Private companies (Adobe, Sun, Microsoft, Real, Apple) had a literal monopoly on video and animation on the Web. A lack of interface between JavaScript and the DOM led to companies like Microsoft freely inventing their own stuff.
If you want to be the steward of a technology, you have to care about the way people are actually using the technology. Otherwise someone else who actually does care will (and did!) come along and do something meaningful.
HTML 5 became a W3C recommendation in 2014, when Chrome had less than a 40% market share.
Web is driven by Google nowadays, so a standards body that only puts a signature into whatever Google decides, is naturally worthless.
Let me be clear: XHTML didn't materially benefit anyone at all except the people who were putting their names on a standard. HTML 5 actually fixed real problems. It made parsing HTML sensible and exhaustively defined. It added open features that companies like Macromedia, Apple, Real, Sun, and Microsoft had a monopoly on for a decade prior. Unlike the W3C, the WHATWG made actual, real life people's lives meaningfully better.
Moreover, most of the things Google is pushing for aren't HTML. Protected Audiences—the ad targeting API Google wants—is sitting in front of the W3C folks as part of the WICG.
Now, Firefox is for all purposes dead, just fairing a bit better than The Year of Linux Desktop, Safari with Apple doing its own thing thanks iDevices market share, and everyone else is basically a reskinned Chrome, or Electron garbage, solidifying ChromeOS as the future we all deserve to have, as the IE lesson is long forgotten.
The IE lesson is long forgotten.
Ironically, without them WebGPU wouldn't even have ever existed.
https://webkit.org/blog/7380/next-generation-3d-graphics-on-...
Practically speaking the internet is now Webkit or Blink. With a pitch of Gecko added.
Nearly 25 years after IE 5.5, I do sometimes feel the Web hasn't actually moved or improved as much as we thought it would.
RIP W3C.