HTML5 Splits Into Two Standards 395
mikejuk writes "Until now the two standards bodies working on HTML5 (WHATWG and W3C) have cooperated. An announcement by WHATWG makes it clear that this is no longer true. WHATWG is going to work on a living standard for HTML which will continue to evolve as more technologies are added. W3C is going the traditional and much more time consuming route of creating a traditional standard which WHATWG refers to as a 'snapshot' of their living standard. Of course now being free of W3C's slower methods WHATWG can accelerate the pace of introducing new technologies to HTML5. Whatever happens, the future has just become more complicated — now you have to ask yourself 'Which HTML5?'"
My first thought... (Score:5, Informative)
... was likely wrong. I saw "WHATWG" and what "who the heck is that?" - I figured the W3C version would really be the only one anybody would care about.
Turns out I was just ignorant regarding WHATWG.
Now I know that WHATWG is, in part, driven by Apple, and its head is now working for Google. That means WebKit will probably follow the WHATWG version, which in turn means the web interface on the vast majority of mobile devices will follow that standard. And that's not even considering Mozilla, who's also part of the WHATWG group.
Really the only major player not involved is Microsoft - but they've been a follower rather than a leader for the past several years, at least when it comes to web standards.
W3C should accelerate the process (Score:4, Informative)
W3C slowed down because Microsoft refused to play along for so long and they are part of the committee. With the about face of IE 9/10 that problem should go away as all browsers rapidly race towards incorporating CSS 3 and HTML 5 features first including simply proposals that are not even draft yet!
I favor cutting off HTML 5 proposals now to finalize it faster. THen put the newer features in webkit and Gecko in HMTL 6. If people are getting giddy about HTML 6 accelerated SVG and ajax stuff it will put pressure to retire IE 8. It will be perceived as very obsolete much quicker and non compliant otherwise the corps wont leave which will mean CSS 2.1 and HTML 4 until 2019.
That thing is a thorn in our side and it will become the new IE 6 of this decade because it comes with Windows 7.
Also doing this will prevent Chrome from becoming the next non standard browser [neowin.net] as well.
Re:Dumb idea. (Score:5, Informative)
However, HTTP requests include a mime-type header that describes the type of document being requested. Currently all HTML uses the same mime-type of "text/html", but there's no reason a HTML5 "text/html5" mime-type couldn't be agreed on.
This is nothing new.. (Score:5, Informative)
This was mentioned over a year ago that this was happening? (January 2011 ! )
http://blog.whatwg.org/html-is-the-new-html5 [whatwg.org]
Re:No shit (Score:4, Informative)
It's because WHATWG has shown nothing but complete ineptitude throughout the standards process and he is simply not fit to be writing any kind of standard, the simple fact is that they (or at least grand dicator Ian Hickson) just doesn't understand what standards are meant to achieve, and how they should reasonably achieve them, let alone the merits of the various specific elements of the standards themselves.
One obvious example that's brought us to this point - the semantic HTML tags are less than useless, because they're based on a now obsolete statistical analysis of common ids/classes. Obsolete because it was done before Web 2.0 was all the rage, meaning prominent ids and classes such as "comments" are now completely left out. The solution? well, it depends who you ask. Some say you should just go back to divs for things that aren't defined, others say you should use something like "article" for a comment, which frankly completely dilutes the meaning and completely destroys any semantic worth of "article" if an article tag isn't necessarily strictly really an article anymore. Effectively you can't infer any meaning from the semantic tags anymore because it's such a fucking hash up as to what they're even going to mean due to different people going different ways on them as a result of their lack of relevance to much of the modern web. This is of course besides the fact that some prominent browsers such as IE7 and IE8 don't even recognise them and so the whole blocks wont be rendered as such using these tags. There are Javascript hacks for browsers not supporting them, but then you're assuming everyone's Javascript is enabled. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the ARIA attributes actually do a far better job of defining semantics, and show how a separate spec such as ARIA would've actually been a more sensible route in the first place. Separation of concerns- even better, semantics should've been defined just like styles are, in external sheets, so that you get all the benefits of that - maintainability, reusability, no effect on backwards compatibility, the ability to define externally for no longer maintained sites and so on. Similarly other issues, such as a complete and utter failure to provide any worthwhile result on a standard for the video tag and so on are why we have this news article.
So here we are, with his living standard. The whole fucking reason Ian Hixon has had to go down this route is because he royally fucked up the spec in the first place, wont admit it, but now realises the only way to make HTML5 stay relevant regarding things such as semantic tags, is to make the spec "living" so that he can update these things. The problem is, if a spec is living it's not really a spec, it's a set of guidelines at best. A spec should be something you can conform to, and not worry about it changing on you so that you no longer necessarily conform to it in the future because it arbitrarily changed.
There's no doubt the W3C was slow, but it was slow for a reason, it represents many hundreds of companies (http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List) from all walks of life that make use of the internet. It was representative of everyone's needs, it took in everyone's opinions. In contrast, sure WHATWG is fast moving, but it is run in a totalitarian manner representing only a handful of companies such as Mozilla and Apple. There is no representation for by far the vast majority of companies and developers, and whatever grand dictator Ian Hickson decides goes, which would be great if he was one of those genuinely nice rational friendly people who tries hard to help everyone, but the fact he's a pretentious arrogant dick who wont listen to reason on a number of issues, kind of fucks things up (e.g. http://cssquirrel.com/2009/07/20/comic-update-the-html5-suggestion-box/ [cssquirrel.com]).
Fundamentally the underlying problem is that WHATWG, as it states in the original reason for it's creation, is that it fo
Back on topic, the editor of both docs wrote this: (Score:5, Informative)
Ian Hickson is the editor of both docs (he's actually the editor of the main HTML standard, the WHATWG one; the draft hosted by the W3C is really nothing more that an old and incomplete copy that nobody among browser vendors takes seriously).
He explained very clearly the past and current situation: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2012Jul/0119.html [w3.org]
And, yes, the WHATWG has done an excellent job so far, bringing much needed features to the web and creating an era of faster and more interoperable browsers. If they had just waited for the W3C we would still be stuck with HTML 4.01, IE6, Flash and other plugins.
Also this is not a new development, HTML (from WHATWG) has started gradually leaving the HTML5 (from W3C) behind a long time ago. Where the two differ, all major browsers (including IE) either already follow HTML or plan to. See this post from more than a year ago: http://blog.whatwg.org/html-is-the-new-html5 [whatwg.org]
When people talk about HTML5 features in browsers and websites, they actually refer to the HTML standard. The HTML5 "working draft" on the W3C website doesn't even support the old 2D canvas API, which is implemented by all browsers!
For those confused. (Score:4, Informative)
WHATWG split off from the W3C work because they couldn't organize additions and clarifications to the HTML 4 spec under the W3C. It is mostly a group of browser-makers (everyone except Microsoft).
The W3C then asked if they could standardize the WHATWG's work as HTML5
What happened a year ago (and is just being put on slashdot today?) was that the WHATWG announced that they weren't going to stop producing additional work. The version under the W3C would eventually be released as version 5.0, but WHATWG would effectively be the HEAD/master version of work on extending HTML.
Which HTML5 is an easy question to answer - there will only be one HTML5. People will put pressure on the browser manufacturers to support the W3C's standardization of HTML as version 5.0. But browser manufacturers will also continue to cram new crap and functionality in ahead of W3C standardization, and attempt to define interoperability of that under the flag "HTML" in WHATWG, a "specification" that grows as the members gain consensus on how new functionality should work (or in some cases, how to advertise the functionality is not offered).
In reality, this is how HTML has _always_ operated.