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Comment by varbhat | Hacker News Reader

i thought that HTML spec is immutable.

The HTML spec is actually constantly evolving. New features like the dialog element [0] and popover [1] were added every year. But removing something from the spec is very rare, if it ever happened before.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

The W3C spec was. But WHATWG and HTML5 represent a coup by the dominant browser corporations (read: Google). The biggest browser dictates the "living standard" and the W3C is forced into a descriptivist role.

The W3C's plan was for HTML4 to be replaced by XHTML. What we commonly call HTML5 is the WHATWG "HTML Living Standard."

the old sages in ivory towers handed us a spec engraved in stone and expected is to live by it

no wonder they were sidelined

They weren't sidelined because they had bad ideas (XHTML 2.0 had a lot of great ideas, many of which HTML5 eventually "borrowed"), they were sidelined because they still saw the web as primarily a document platform and Google especially was trying to push it as a larger application platform. It wasn't a battle between the ivory tower and practical concerns, it was a proxy battle in the general war between the web as a place optimized to link between meaningful, accessibility-first documents and the web as a place to host generalized applications with accessibility often an afterthought. (ARIA is great, but ARIA can only do so much, not as much of it by default/a pit of success as XHTML 2.0 once hoped to be.)

The WHATWG HTML spec. is famously mutable. They literally call it a “living standard” and it separates them from the versioned W3C standard.

Yep, doesn't this make certain pages not work anymore?

It makes them not work in Chrome. For any application that supports XSLT they'll continue to work fine.

it will. It will make old non-updated pages break with same fate as old outdated pages which used MathML in the past and were not updated with polyfills.

FYI, MathML is currently shipping (again, after all these years) in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari[1].

[1] https://mathml.igalia.com/

It's immutable in the sense of "only remove stuff after incredibly careful consideration".

Which Chrome has transmuted into "we do whatever we want to do". Remember their attempt to remove confirm/prompt?

Here's the HTML spec: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/

An implementation with >90% market share becomes the defacto standard.

Who else is watching this who grew up watching this same movie play out with Microsoft/IE as the villain and Google as the hero? (Anyone want to make the "live long enough" quote?)

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