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HTML5 Splits Into Two Standards
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?'"
"Living standard"? Perpetually unfinished with no accountability for stability, is more like it. Didn't Google patent that?
What a monumentally bad idea ...
The criticism of the W3C that led to WHATWG being formed was twofold:
1) The W3C wasn't fixing obvious bugs in HTML4 (e.g. places where the standard required behavior that was not compatible with actual websites).
2) The W3C was instead spending its time working on XHTML2, which it had purposefully designed to be backwards-incompatible with HTML4 so that you couldn't implement the two in a single rendering engine.
A large part of the reason for #2 was that the browser vendors had at most 5 votes total on the working group, while there were lots of other voters who were more interested in pie-in-the-sky projects than actually producing something that could work on the web. So what the browser vendors _actually_ got tired of was having no say at all and everyone feeling entitled to order them to do their bidding, no matter whether the bidding made any sense.
Note that the current situation is pretty different from what was going on when the WHATWG was first founded. It's a bit of a mess, but it's not the complete and utter disaster things were back then.
I don't understand why people think this is such a bad idea. This is the similar to any source tree having a "development branch" and a "stable branch". WHATWG will be responsible for evolving the fast-paced devlopment branch of HTML while W3C will take occasional snapshots and stabilize the features of the development branch into "full standards". I assume that most of the complaints here are related to either bad marketing - WHATWG should just start calling their version HTML6 or "future HTML" or something - or the fact that these bodies (especially the W3C) move slowly and we are in the middle of a new stable branch getting pulled.
By the way, HTML5 isn't, according to the W3C a standard yet. The current HTML standard is 4.0.1. HTML5 is planned to be a "full standard" in 2014. In that time, WHATWG will introduce dozens of new major features into what will probably be called either HTML6 or HTML5.1 when the W3C gets around to pulling another snapshot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Version_history_of_the_standard
Here's the thing: For years now, the rest of the industry's been held back by the "Business environment". Blackberry, IE6, Windows Servers and the like... Stable features, rarely updated (say, every couple of years or so if you're lucky), and a concrete environment for multi-year projects to target.
Now, we have an entirely different ethos trying to compete - the rapid-fire consumer-oriented model of iOS, Android, Chrome and the rest. This is all about eyeballs, because they're not pitching to Joe CTO who needs 2 years to complete his project, which should run for another 20. The audience in this case is the man or woman on the street, who will jump to the next shiny thing in a heartbeat, because the investment is really not that high.
The first method leads to stagnation - we've lived through that... The second leads to instability. That too, we've seen. It remains to be seen, how this will be balanced out as time goes on. Because this isn't going away anymore.