

W3C declares HTML5 standard complete - darklrd
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/28/w3c-declares-html5-standard-done/

======
johansch
[http://www.cnet.com/au/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups-
sti...](http://www.cnet.com/au/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups-still-
wrestle-over-webs-future/)

""The real problem is of course that the W3C is still copying our work even
after we asked them to stop doing that," [Anne] van Kesteren said. It's legal,
but "oftentimes it comes pretty close [to] or is actual plagiarism."

It's one of many instances of copying, Hickson said. "For reasons that defy my
understanding, the W3C staff refuse to treat the WHATWG as a peer
organization" that relies on WHATWG's work, he said. Instead, it creates its
own copies of some standards. "They'll eventually say they have a 'final'
version, and then they'll stop fixing bugs. It's very sad."

~~~
cwyers
It's amusing to me to watch the WHATWG people complain about the W3C having
the temerity to put out revisions to their own specification, and then
complaining about how the W3C is copying their work. Would they rather W3C put
out an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT HTML specification from theirs? Would that be better
for anyone at all?

~~~
domenicd
Yes, actually. We'd encourage the HTML working group to do original work. Many
W3C working groups do that, e.g. the webapps working group worked on web
components and various other specs, and it helps the web platform.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
So they should reinvent the wheel when there are good solutions out there?

Isn't the whole point of standards to stop that sort of thing happening?

I get that you may feel that someone is just appropriating your work rather
than doing their own but if your aim is to build a standard then reusing
things is probably going to be part of doing that.

~~~
cwyers
What makes this really funny for me is that WHATWG fully appropriated the spec
that W3C wrote for HTML and the DOM, as well as _the names HTML and DOM_.

~~~
gsnedders
The specs were written from scratch, because the W3C holds the copyright on
them (the old specs are also of relatively little use). The spec now called
HTML5 was officially called Web Applications 1.0 till after the W3C HTML WG
was (re-)chartered.

------
nostrademons
The other huge accomplishment of HTML5 is completely standardizing many
fundamental parts of the web that previously were a mess of browser
incompatibilities. 6 years ago, if you wanted to parse HTML, you might reach
for BeautifulSoup, or libxml, or Hpricot, or Nokogiri...and they would all be
subtly different in the parse tree they produced. And they couldn't do any
better, because if you viewed the page in IE, or Firefox, or Chrome, or
Safari, you might get a different parse tree.

Now, IE9+, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are all basically guaranteed to look at
the same page in the same way, and the "toolsmith" parsers like Gumbo or
html5lib are all rapidly converging on the standard. So it's finally possible
to see a page the way a browser sees it.

~~~
pjmlp
> Now, IE9+, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are all basically guaranteed to look
> at the same page in the same way, and the "toolsmith" parsers like Gumbo or
> html5lib are all rapidly converging on the standard. So it's finally
> possible to see a page the way a browser sees it.

The web projects I have to take part on, are a distant reality from that
description.

~~~
ufo
Are you talking about inconsistent HTML parsing or inconsistent CSS rendering?
The latter is much more of a pita than the former.

~~~
nostrademons
If you stick to the basics of CSS that have been around for a decade or so,
both of them are basically solved problems. Browsers are remarkably uniform in
how they handle the stuff that was a PITA in 2008.

The problem is that expectations adjust too, and now we want all these new
HTML5 features that were just pioneered in a single browser a couple years
ago. _Those_ have a lot of cross-browser issues.

~~~
obviouslygreen
In many environments, expectations don't have to adjust. With corporate
clients, expectations were never reasonable in the first place, and many
common requirements that have been around for decades _still_ aren't
reasonable.

Clients often demand idiocy like "pixel perfection," specific fonts, custom
scaling behavior for size (including application-controlled zooming), and
other things that simply aren't part of the paradigm for accessing websites
through web browsers.

Between that and the fact that going "beyond the basics of CSS" is a pretty
common thing, browser interfailure is still a real problem. It's not as bad as
it used to be, but the problem is still there, and many of us are still
dealing with it regularly.

------
lucideer
The term "WHATWG" seems to be conspicuously absent from this article. I wonder
where they factor into this announcement.

~~~
yuhong
I think they already moved to living standard.

~~~
dpkendal
Indeed, the W3C's work on HTML5 is irrelevant. It exists only for the purpose
of giving the W3C-qua-organization the appearance of being involved in the
further development of HTML.

~~~
gsnedders
I think that's disingenuous — even as someone who has been around the WHATWG
for longer than the W3C has been working on HTML5. One clear reason that
publication as a REC is important because it implies a royalty-free patent
grant between all members of the WG.

~~~
pornel
It's interesting that WHATWG is trying to get the patent commitments by being
a W3C Community Group:

[https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#What.27s_the_patent_story_f...](https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#What.27s_the_patent_story_for_WHATWG_standards.3F)

------
RexRollman
This announcement makes me miss Mark Pilgrim. I wish he was still publishing
his blog.

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cwyers
This CNet article seems to have a lot more detail than the Techcrunch one:

[http://www.cnet.com/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups-
still-...](http://www.cnet.com/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups-still-
wrestle-over-webs-future/#ftag=CAD590a51e)

------
j4meserljoness
Cool, but It doesn't really matter what W3C says. In the end it is all about
what the Oligarchy of popular browser implementers decide to implement.

~~~
valisystem
> the Oligarchy of popular browser implementers

In the past, only Mozilla cared about what the W3C said, and they built
Firefox on the idea that interoperability by following the standards is the
way to go. Not that long after Apple initiated Safari, and led Google to their
own browser initiative.

All this because Mozilla, the insignificant actor of the all IE time, decided
to follow W3C.

You're not totally wrong telling that W3C doesn't mater that much, but
browsers are what they are today because of W3C for a good part, and it still
have a very important place in the browser game.

~~~
domenicd
This is pretty much the opposite of how things went down.

If browsers followed the W3C, we'd be living in XML utopia (XHTML2, XForms,
XLink, XEvents, etc.). In 2004 a group of implementers (specifically Mozilla,
Opera, and Apple) proposed to the W3C to focus on web applications by evolving
HTML and the DOM, but were flat-out turned down, and had to go off and form
their own standards organization---the WHATWG. Today, that is where much of
the foundational work of the web platform is still done:
[https://spec.whatwg.org/](https://spec.whatwg.org/)

~~~
pjmlp
And we could have goten something similar to XAML, instead of the HTML, CSS
magic and JavaScript workarounds to replicate desktop behavious and UIs.

~~~
coldtea
Do the names XHTML2, XForms, XLink, XEvents invoke an image of something like
XAML to you?

We would have ended in some huge JAVA EE circa 2004 mess, with XML to spare
and perhaps RDF and a couple ad-hoc languages thrown in for good measure.

~~~
pjmlp
Yes, because in the XHTML world, tags could loose any semantic meaning.

In HTML 5, one is abandoned to the CSS tricks and JavaScript hacks to make
visual UI components of HTML tags.

Every time I get a consultant gig outside the web world, I rejoice.

Yet I've spend a big part of my career involved in web development.

------
codeaken
Final standards document

[http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/](http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-
html5-20141028/)

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indubitably
The most important thing about HTML5 is <video>? What a weird statement.

~~~
bouk
Making Flash obsolete is pretty important

~~~
general_failure
Video doesn't kill the flash star.

~~~
da_n
I'm hoping Chrome will drop their built-in flash runtime, only thing it's used
for is ads.

~~~
pjmlp
I imagine you don't play browser games.

~~~
coldtea
I imagine not that many people would care if they turned into HTML5 Canvas
games.

Nothing kills a laptop battery or spins the fans like BS flash browser games.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I imagine not that many people would care if they turned into HTML5 Canvas
> games.

Presumably, the developers still making Flash games would, since HTML5 Canvas
has wider reach than Flash, yet they still use Flash.

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malandrew
I'm hoping for a scene graph standard for HTML6 and a spec that allows
multiple documents per window (which themselves could be nodes on a scene
graph) instead of the one document per window.

~~~
annamarie
HTML5 is a living standard, no? There isn't going to be an "HTML6".

~~~
thristian
The spec published by WHATWG is a living standard, and is just called "HTML".
The expectation is that every so often the W3C will pick a revision of the
WHATWG's HTML spec and stamp it with a version number.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The expectation is that every so often the W3C will pick a revision of the
> WHATWG's HTML spec and stamp it with a version number.

W3C HTML5 is not just a snapshot of a particular revision of the WHATWG Living
Standard. In a reasonable world, W3C HTML5 (etc.) would be a subset of the
WHATWG Living Standard on the date the former was published, but I'm not sure
that even that is strictly the case.

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jaredmcateer
Does anyone know how is Doctype versioning going to work with W3Cs snapshoting
of the living standard? Or are browsers just going to ignore W3C and stick to
implementing WHATWGs spec?

~~~
rimantas
No browser ever paid any attention to the version of the HTML specified. The
only use for DOCTYPE—and the reason it remains in HTML5—is "doctype
switching", i.e. different rendering modes are triggered in the browsers. You
can use "html", "html5", "html6.2" or "foobarbaz" as your doctype, the effect
will be the same—they will all trigger standards compliant mode.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>'You can use "html", "html5", "html6.2" or "foobarbaz" as your doctype, the
effect will be the same—they will all trigger standards compliant mode.' //

You're wrong if your asserting that any doctype produces the same results
globally but it probably doesn't matter unless you're targeting legacy UA.

See e.g. "Appendix: Handling of Some Doctypes in text/html" at
[https://hsivonen.fi/doctype/](https://hsivonen.fi/doctype/) or Eric Meyer's
[http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/network/2000/04/14/doctype/...](http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/network/2000/04/14/doctype/index.html)
(for MacIE5 ... like I said it probably won't matter!).

~~~
gsnedders
Speaking of IE/Mac, that's the reason why the HTML DOCTYPE now is `<!doctype
html>`. If it hadn't been for IE/Mac, it'd be `<!doctype>`.

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taf2
i guess it's finally time to upgrade that .vimrc to include syntax
highlighting for the new tags... canvas, video, audio, nav, section, etc..

~~~
ushi
i know it was just a joke, but for vim users working with html i recommend the
html5 plugin[0].

[0] [https://github.com/othree/html5.vim](https://github.com/othree/html5.vim)

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deskamess
I was hoping they would add file api support for downloading to non sand boxed
environment with mandatory user interaction prompts. The api would prompt for
the file download location (via file dialog) but after that, how the file is
filled up is up to the web client (and happens in the background). This would
allow for parallel download workers via the existing get range option.

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gsnedders
[http://html5doctor.com/the-ride-to-5/](http://html5doctor.com/the-ride-to-5/)
is an interesting overview of perspectives of various people who've been
around HTML5 for years about its publication as a REC.

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yoran
Kind of ironic that the embedded Vimeo video in the article is Flash.

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yuhong
Wonder when the IE standard support documents listing all the "deviations"
from HTML5 will happen.

~~~
kyriakos
latest versions of IE are pretty good regarding standards.

~~~
recursive
I wonder when they will get as good as the rest of the browsers that are out.
I still find more bugs in IE11 than any other current browser.

~~~
Bahamut
I see more Safari bugs/issues - it's surprising how poor Safari is in some
areas.

