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HTML5 Splits Into Two Standards

Posted by timothy on from the so-many-to-choose-from dept.

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?'"

17 of 395 comments (clear)

  1. Dumb idea. by kingramon0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So when browsers claim to be fully HTML5 compliant, will that even have any meaning anymore?

    1. Re:Dumb idea. by tooyoung · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Six weeks is not really an unreasonably short release cadence

      But it is an unreasonably short update cadence for the user. You have totally missed the parent's point - people don't want to be updating their software every six weeks. For the home user, this is an annoyance. For the SMB or enterprise, this is a nightmare.

      Just because you can release new features every six weeks doesn't mean that you should. As the parent said, this seems to be more for the "gee-whiz" factor than anything else. That, or some well intentioned soul doesn't understand that flooding the user base with software updates doesn't really equate to a good experience.

    2. Re:Dumb idea. by oiron · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Dumb idea. by Xest · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It doesn't help that they don't even seem to know what's in each release themselves. Case in point, I loaded up Firefox yesterday and it asked me if I wanted to install a security and stability update, so I clicked yes and it installed... ...but if it's just a security and stability update, why the fuck has my user interface changed? Were the old back/forward and home buttons a security risk then? Thanks Mozilla, for lying to me about what was in the update.

      Honestly, if they can't even tell what they're putting into each patch there's really little hope for the process.

  2. Newsflash! HTML5 fork now an official Google BETA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Living standard"? Perpetually unfinished with no accountability for stability, is more like it. Didn't Google patent that?

    What a monumentally bad idea ...

  3. ...now you have to ask yourself 'Which HTML5?'" by ClaraBow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The one supported by by Webkit and Gecko?

  4. I have mod points by LilBlackKittie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    and I wanted to moderate this story down for its appalling failure to call W3C "W3C" two times out of three.

  5. How can a standard be "living"? by An+Anonymous+Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Living standard" is kind of an oxymoron. The whole point of having a standard is so that authors have something to target, and developers know what is necessary to be standards compliant. A constantly evolving standard creates a moving target, which I believe is actually counter-productive.

    1. Re:How can a standard be "living"? by colinrichardday · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There is no reason the HTML5 standard needs to change that often if it's well thought out in the first place .

      I believe that I've detected a problem.

  6. Slow down by MS · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The whole world should slow down. Stick with a stable standard for a while. And relax.

    1. Re:Slow down by CanHasDIY · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The whole world should slow down. Stick with a stable standard for a while. And relax.

      This is probably the deepest, most profound statement on the internet today, if you take the time to really drink it in.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
  7. Re:My first thought... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I wouldn't really call Microsoft a follower of *any* standards, but I understand what you're trying to say.

  8. Re:My first thought... by BZ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  9. Back on topic, the editor of both docs wrote this: by YA_Python_dev · · 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

    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

    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!

    --
    There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
  10. Good Idea! by TwinkieStix · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  11. Re:The great thing about first posts by vjoel · · Score: 5, Funny

    In soviet Russia, the standard chooses you!

    In soviet Russia, the standard forks you!

    --
    What part of `yes no` don't you understand?
  12. Re:CANT READ SLASHDOT ANYMORE by fustakrakich · · Score: 5, Funny

    He would... if he could see where he was..

    --
    “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”