It's Official: HTML5 Is a W3C Standard

rjmarvin (3001897) writes The Worldwide Web Consortium today has elevated the HTML5 specification to 'recommendation' status , giving it the group's highest level of endorsement, which is akin to becoming a standard. The W3C also introduced Application Foundations with the announcement of the HTML5 recommendation to aid developers in writing Web applications, and said the organization is working with patents holders of the H.264 codec to agree on a baseline royalty-free interoperability level commitment.

Comments

Well, that's cool I guess

[halivar]

But it's already a de facto standard. I think W3C's clout in this area is diminished because the market already decided it was a standard long before they did.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[tuffy]

Turning de facto standards that have been implemented in actual browsers into a formal specification is how standards work best.

Coming up with a specification first and hoping someone will be able to implement it is how we wound up with Perl 6.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[cloud.pt]

Your'e not giving enough credit to the organization that enabled you to write comments that look this c o o l

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the point of the W3C. It helps fair competition. They only write what is done by actual code, so that a newcomer can come and claim they do what is documented, and should be compatible. If something isn't compatible with that new software, the blame is on the old, well implanted dudes that didn't properly tell what they were doing.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't blame the W3C for the fact that "the market" took so long to implement HTML5 support. This news is about the W3C standard being upgraded to "recommendation" status, which happens only after web browsers finally adopt it.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember kids, caps lock is cruise control for cool!

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[i kan reed]

Well, there's a steaming pile of ignorance there.

1. Almost all serious websites are xhtml compliant. That's because being compliant is good for any bots crawling the site.
2. Do you imagine that all the HTML5 support that already exists came from nowhere? It was browser devs implementing the pre-reccomendations for HTML5 as a good idea. If the no one "gives a damn" about w3c, you'd find Chrome and Firefox behaving very differently with how they implemented next-gen UI elements.
3. Just use jquery or something, sheesh. No one needs to manually fiddle with DOM anymore.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember kids, caps lock is cruise control for n00b!

FTFY

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Really? Because I see a lot of <br> and NOT <br/> tags in source these days.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[NotDrWho]

Turning de facto standards that have been implemented in actual browsers into a formal specification is how standards work best.

It's funny, back in the day all everyone did on /. was bitch and moan every time MS implemented anything in IE that wasn't W3C standard. Now that it's not THE EVIL MICROSOFT doing it, suddenly everyone is all "FUCK W3C!!!"

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[i kan reed]

I'm not sure slashdot counts as serious.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[nine-times]

IIRC, HTML5 had problems getting motion in the first place because the major vendors were having trouble playing nice. W3C made a decision to step back and let them work it out, in the understanding that they'd step back in when a standard emerged.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Anonymous Psychopath]

This is more or less how technology standards work. Would you say the IEEE has no clout because manufacturers ship hardware while the standard is still in draft?

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[brunes69]

The difference is, when Apple and Google and Mozilla do something, they are seldom working in a vaccum. They work together for the most part on emerging web technologies and push them forward. There are a few outliers like HTML5 video where there is a lot of vested interest, but if you look at it objectively, this is nowhere near the EEE mantra of Microsoft.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[UnknownSoldier]

> Just use jquery or something, sheesh. No one needs to manually fiddle with DOM anymore.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not agains jQuery. It serves a useful purpose. HOWEVER, yeah, like I have better things to do then debug that unholy-mess called jQuery.

There is a time to manipulate DOM with small, simple, fast Javascript. And a time to use a more heavyweight solution.

Re: Well, that's cool I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

A vacuum of three unaccountable organizations really isn't any better, in practice, than a vacuum of one unaccountable organization.

And those three organizations aren't even of remotely equivalent strength or influence. One of them offers a browser that only runs on a small handful of desktop and laptops, and even there it isn't often used. Another one of them used to be a big player, but then made really dumb UI changes that drove away most if its browser's users. The last player is the one with the real influence, because it holds over 50% of the market, and it even funds the screw-up player to the tune of millions of dollars a year. The first two players are practically irrelevant.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Richard_at_work]

Lets not forget where XmlHttpRequest came from...

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[gstoddart]

Well, to put that into perspective ... Microsoft used to sit on standards boards, and before the standard was finalized they'd file submarine patents, and do their own implementation which was already not compliant and had proprietary extensions.

So, when Microsoft was doing it, it really was evil ... ha ha ha, thanks for telling us how to implement this, now we've patented it, and we're already extending it for our own purposes.

There were a bunch of years where Microsoft never found a standard they couldn't completely fsck up for their own interests.

Microsoft used to do it to shit on the standards process and give themselves something which didn't work with anything else -- because Microsoft didn't want standards to succeed. If it wasn't theirs, it needed to be destroyed.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[tuffy]

Browsers pushing stuff outside the standard may have given us the and tags, but it also gave us the tag. The good thing about having a standards body is that it can incorporate the useful stuff into the next standard while (hopefully) relegating the junk to permanent outcast status.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[jellomizer]

But there is not an official standard to point to when your least favorite browser isn't rendering properly.

The neat thing about following a standard, is you get standard results.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[CrashNBrn]

If only Microsoft had of gotten its way 15 years ago, we would of had:

{
width:21px;
padding:5px;
margin:5px;
border: 1px solid black;
}
Where the total width is what you say it is: 21px. Instead we have the stupidity that the actual width is 32px. and paddings, margins et al ADD to the defined width instead of being a part of the element. Which makes calculating dimensions in HTML a fucking pain in the ass.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[KingMotley]

Please show an example where Microsoft sat on a standards body and then patented something regarding that spec, because as much as you'd like to believe this is true, it simply isn't. You have this backwards. Microsoft often had patents relating to things they sat on a standards body for (much like everyone else on that committee), and in most cases had already implemented a version of it before the committee was formed, let alone ratified anything. In some cases, they implemented something that was being discussed prior to ratification (which takes years), and then the standards body changed their minds and made changes to the standard before ratifying it. And in other cases, Microsoft implemented functionality that was already prevalent in the marketplace (another companies work -- usually netscape), and the standards body came up with a different, incompatible solution to the same thing.

If you have an example (any example) of what you say, I'd like to hear it, because I've never found any evidence of it, yet.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[gsnedders]

On the other hand, the W3C Patent Policy makes it impossible for MS to do that --- they must either disclose their patents and notify the group that they are withholding them from the royalty-free grant within 180 days of certain points of the spec's development or they grant all members of the group an irrevocable RF grant (the intention of the policy is you give a list of all patents you have covering the spec and whether you're withholding them; in practice most people don't even look at patent portfolios because they know they'd just give an RF grant for any it covers and hence it's not worth the time looking).

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[erapert]

Running an app in a browser is already a heavyweight solution. Using Javascript instead of a real (i.e. native) programming language is already a heavyweight solution. The web is neat, but it could be vastly better than it is. How?
By getting rid of Javascript all together and replacing it with something native (i.e. C++ running under a run-time similar to NaCl).
Pre-compiling HTML and CSS to some kind of bytecode rather than parsing it all down from text.
Then bundle all that up into a single compressed package per-page and ready to go. The packages would be signed with a crypto key so that you know it came from the site you're navigating to and has the contents that it claims to have.

I'm not a security expert, but a crypto hash like this should be possible, right? Anyway let's not pretend like the current mess on the web is totally secure.
I'm not a code guru, but running a native binary should get much better performance than Javascript I don't care how optimized modern JS interpreters/JITs are (and I know they've done some amazing things with them).
I'm not an HTML/CSS guru, but surely it'd be faster to parse bytecode than plain text.

Worried that the web will turn into a wasteland without the ability to read the source code of web pages? First, when was the last time you looked at the source to anything without being paid to do so? Second, browsers could simply de-compile the markup bytecode and display it-- it's not anywhere close to as complex as real code.
Worried about security holes? The native run-time would simply not support functions that allow you to work outside the browser's resources (i.e. the file system). Worried about pointers etc? Fine, use ref counting or a GC language like Go or Rust. Anyway, do you worry about that stuff right now? The browser you're using ALREADY is completely written in C or C++.
I don't want to come across as being an iconoclast or as trying to sound like I'm better or more know more than the guys currently building the infrastructure. I'm just putting this stuff out there as an idea that I hope is a good one or at least not a terrible one.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[wonkey_monkey]

{ box-sizing:border-box; width:21px; padding:5px; margin:5px; border:1px solid black; }

Doesn't include the margins (none of the options do), but your bordered box will be 21 pixels wide (inclusive of borders). box-sizing:padding-box; makes it 21 pixels excluding borders.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[CrashNBrn]

Thanks, I forgot about that. At least it wasn't added to the "display" property. And there's less need for browser specific css extensions:

-webkit-box-sizing: border-box; /* Safari/Chrome, other WebKit */
-moz-box-sizing: border-box; /* Firefox, other Gecko */

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[ultranova]

Where the total width is what you say it is: 21px. Instead we have the stupidity that the actual width is 32px. and paddings, margins et al ADD to the defined width instead of being a part of the element. Which makes calculating dimensions in HTML a fucking pain in the ass.

What happens if the total width you declare is less than the combined width of paddings, margins and borders? Which seems likely, if addition is such a "pain in the ass" for you, especially when CSS inheritance rules come to play.

Also, as a user, I say this: the harder it's for HTML "programmers" to specify element sizes - especially in pixels - the harder it is for you to make a layout that breaks on any configuration you didn't expect (which would be almost all of them), which in turn makes things better for me.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Wraithlyn]

Sorry, but the steaming pile of ignorance is yours.

> 1. Almost all serious websites are xhtml compliant.

Um, bullshit? Want to try backing that up with something? A random sampling of cnn.com, google news, apple.com, Facebook, Youtube, and LinkedIn shows they all use HTML5 doctype. And here's a graph showing XHTML's continuous decline as it dies a well deserved death.

> 2. Do you imagine that all the HTML5 support that already exists came from nowhere? It was browser devs implementing the pre-reccomendations for HTML5

No, it was browser devs (WHATWG, as the GP correctly pointed out) ignoring the W3C's strict XHTML idiocy and opting for a saner route.

The WHATWG was formed in response to the slow development of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web standards and W3C's decision to abandon HTML in favor of XML-based technologies.

- Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

We got HTML5 despite the W3C, not thanks to them.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML ne XHTML

Re: Well, that's cool I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

One of them offers a browser that only runs on a small handful of desktop and laptops

Oh, and that whole iOS thing.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing that WHATWG emerged and put out a competing, and better, standard while XHTML 2.0 rotted on the vine. I would have loved to see HTML 5 features been in the spec for XHTML 2.0 at the time they were in the spec for HTML 5 -- but that wasn't happening.

This isn't a single browser added some nice features and then patented it so no one else could interoperate with that code. This was the w3c broke down, and someone else needed to step into the gap. WHATWG formed, and took over pushing the web standards forward. They did so not only in backward compatible (graceful degradation), but even in a "future forward" progressive enhancement way. The sites work on old browsers, you just get more features if your browser can support them.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like a good idea, but reality seems to say otherwise.
Going native means breaking interoperability. Which is the main streght of the web. So no chance in hell.
You can do that using an ActiveX control; you can create an entire web with one. It would be fully native, that's for sure. Not that I recommend it.

If you don't want to go so far, you can use some kind of virtual machine, It has been done for at least 20 years. We call it Java applets. Some people tried to create entire web pages with them. Nobody liked nor visited them. Nowadays, Java in the browser is nearly dead. Yuck. Another option is Silverlight, or WPF in the browser. Double yuck.

You can use some kind of plugin to deliver your content in some kind of binary or not so binary blob. There have been a bunch of those. Flash or Shockwave, for example. They have some success in ancient times, nowadays nobody wants to get near them. HTML5 killed them. Steve Jobs was an accomplice.

So judging from the past, the more farther you go from HTML+JS to the metal, the worst failure you will meet. And I'll add this for free: it will be fully deserved.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Euler]

Paper standards are worthless 9 times out of 10; typically they are full of ambiguity or have stipulations that are grossly inefficient to implement. There is a necessary research phase to writing airtight, or even usable specs. I call this 'implementation.' So yes, de-facto specifications are the best. You could do the research phase and just throw away the resulting code and test results, but why do that? So the only use I have for a standards body is to perform quality-control on the existing documentation.

RFC's are a good model: you invent something - then just document it and let people file their complaints. But it is not open for general blue-sky speculation.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

You have this backwards. Microsoft often had patents relating to things they sat on a standards body for (much like everyone else on that committee), and in most cases had already implemented a version of it before the committee was formed, let alone ratified anything.

Shill for Microsoft much?

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Cruxus]

The sweet spot is the XHTML syntax of HTML5; it gets you the advantages of using all your existing XML tooling and strict conformance checking with modern HTML5 web app support.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[mtbink.com]

the same company that invented .innerHTML :P

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're confusing Microsoft with Rambus...

Re: Well, that's cool I guess

[KingMotley]

Asking for some example is considered a shill? I guess we don't need things like facts any more. Let's just make stuff up and call it undeniable truth.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Rakarra]

Shill for Microsoft much?

Can't you just answer the question?

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

"No, it was browser devs (WHATWG, as the GP correctly pointed out) ignoring the W3C's strict XHTML idiocy and opting for a saner route."

There's nothing sane about WHATWG's spec. Whilst I understand that strict XML is apparently too difficult for Joe Average to produce apparently (even though Joe Average stopped writing HTML and started using Blogger, Wordpress, Facebook et. al. about 10 years ago rather than writing his own markup) but WHATWG's sidelining of XML altogether is a far worse situation from the web.

Yes I know that the claim is "but browsers have to just fail rather than best effort it if it's not XML compliant!" but guess what happens with broken HTML5? exactly not that- even if you don't follow the spec browsers will still breach it and best effort it, something that could just as well be done with XML contrary to the popular lie that WHATWG has spread. In fact, if people hadn't noticed then that's exactly how the web has worked for about a decade before HTML5 came along to start declaring we should all produce shit once again.

So we've gone from moving towards a web that was highly interoperable by just about every device and framework on the planet (what doesn't have an XML parser?) to a push back towards a really bad document format that basically no one other than browsers can reliably work with. How is this a good thing in any way whatsoever?

I've worked on real world systems where a client had an old proprietary black box piece of software that spewed out web pages for a wizard to guide them through an expert system and these folks had many years of man hours invested in this and their implemented data. They know they'll have to get rid of it one day but they can't replace it quick enough whilst still staying relevant so they had to somehow integrate this black box system into their overall workflow process, what a nightmare! Except it wasn't. Because it adhered to the XHTML1.1 spec with it's output, which meant that performing transforms on it's output and providing simple standardised post backs as input meant that this thing could be invisibly and harmlessly integrated into the workflow of their new system- there was no clear jump from one system to the other, it's all seamless and you can't even tell that black box is still there. Of course you could do this with HTML5 but it's necessitate far more code (and hence invariably far more bugs) and would require the bundling of a far less mature set of parsing tools with far more questionable support. All in all it'd make the system far far more shit.

I know a lot of HTML5 fanboys like to point to Ian Hickson's diatribe of hatred against XML, but most of it is actually wrong and shows the same monumental lack of understanding of XML as he shows for good software development practice in general.

Which is why we've ended up with the W3C's HTML5 recommendation which is different to WHATWG's HTML5 "living spec" - you know why that happens? Because it took the professionals at W3C to say look, specs don't "live" otherwise they're not fucking specs because it would mean something that is HTML5 compliant by a company that's gone bust, might end up not HTML5 compliant tomorrow as the spec "lives" on.

HTML5 is a monumentally abysmal clusterfuck. It's written by people who only gave a shit about the opinions of one group of people - browser manufacturers (you know, the guys who have never been able to follow spec, and who have given us some of the most sluggish and security vulnerable software in the industry) whilst not giving a fuck about everyone else on earth.

I'd seriously question anyone's ability who thinks HTML5 is a good development, it's shit for software development, it's a step backwards for accessibility, and it's most widely proclaimed features like canvas could've been implemented just as well without HTML5 into a proper spec written by people who know both what they're doing and who are willing to take the interests of everyone into account rather than just their highly incompetent browser payma

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[MoarSauce123]

Yes, and no. The market took what was available for HTML5 and as before implemented it in various interpretations making the rendering engines and browsers behave differently in so many areas that it makes a mockery of a standard. There is currently not a single browser available that fully supports HTML5 and CSS3. I test web apps and it just sucks that after passing all tests in Chrome a bunch of them fail in Firefox and half of them fail in IE and then Safari on OS X is totally different again. The sole point of a standard is that anything coded to standard will yield IDENTICAL results on any standards compliant browser. Sadly, coding to standard will cause code to break in most current browsers. Also, HTML5 standard as it is right now leaves too much up to the implementers, like the fuzzy rules about what to do with password fields and autocomplete. As a developer I can set password fields not to be considered for autocomplete because there are significant security risks with storing passwords in shared environments, yet none of the browsers honor this directive in favor of pushing their own password manager. And that by default and with no means to turn it off. I understand the desire to give the user the power to decide, but in some cases the user does not understand or does understand, but doesn't care. Pushing security decisions always to the user is just too cheap. There are plenty other examples. Also, the tug of war over the video encoding to be used ending in what some for profits want. There is no reason to include a licensed or potentially licenseable technology in an open standard. For these reasons I agree that the W3C's clout is diminished, especially when the market now needs clear guidance on what HTML6 and CSS4 will be.

Re:Well, that's cool I guess

[MoarSauce123]

Sites are HTML5 compatible, not compliant! HTML5 compliance will cause many things to not work in current browsers.

Updating

[Roodvlees]

It's so sad that some are still stuck on older versions of IE (South Korea).
Especially when there are two free and better alternatives...
A customer of my company now want's us to make an app we made working for IE 9 :(

Re:Updating

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't they upgrade? Everything that can run IE 9 should be able to run IE 11/12, whatever the current versions is, I think. Is sticking to old versions of IE a big problem in South Korea specifically?

Re:Updating

[Anonymous Coward]

I's it an app that add's erroneou's apo'strophe's to word's?

Re:Updating

[Anonymous Coward]

Is sticking to old versions of IE a big problem in South Korea specifically?

Yes, they were very early adopters on online shopping.
To make it work the online shops and banks are tied to some crappy software written in vb or whatever that only runs on old versions of IE. I don't know about IE9 though, I thought they were stuck with IE6 or something.

Re: Updating

[AvitarX]

I think it also had to do with export restrictions, so they implemented encryption using activex before said restrictions were loosened.

Into the 90s (late even I think) useful encryption couldn't be exported much from the US.

bye flash

[Anonymous Coward]

good riddance

Re:bye flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash died a long time ago. The only people who still use it are the posers who learned it without keeping up to date on new technologies and are now trying to justify their jobs.

Java's demise

[Kokuyo]

One can only hope more appliance producers will ditch Java for HTML5 web interfaces... configuring SAN switches has become a freaking pain in the butt.

Re:Java's demise

[aethelrick]

Not being a SAN appliance user myself, I'm curious to know what form of Java are you encountering? If they have a Java config application you install on your PC, then it sounds like they have a crappy UI and my guess is that a language change won't help them program a better one. If however they are serving up a Java applet from an embedded server within the appliance then I guess they could use an update because the last time I saw an applet in the wild I fell off my stegosaurus in shock.

Re:Java's demise

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.falstad.com/circuit/

Fairly popular too.

Re:Java's demise

[2fuf]

Yeah totally, imagine: having to fire up a 10 year old VirtualPC to run the outdated OS that runs the outdated browser that uses the outdated Javascript engine to configure your switch. What an improvement over Java that will be :-)

Re:Java's demise

[Anonymous Coward]

Java's demise? I doubt that millions of Enterprise systems will switch away from the language that powers their server-side applications.

Seriously, give it a rest.

Re:Java's demise

[Anonymous Coward]

The interface is irrelevant to the backend which will still be java if they changed the interface to HTML5

WHY THE LINK ISN'T WORKING

[rjmarvin]

The W3C was unclear about the embargo time for the news, and as a result the story has been pulled for the moment. It will be live again at 10am PST/1pm EST.

Re:WHY THE LINK ISN'T WORKING

[jeffb (2.718)]

If they're actually specifying the embargo time in Eastern or Pacific Standard Time, even though most of the US remains on Daylight Saving Time until Sunday Nov 2, the confusion may last a bit longer than they expect.

I love the way the link leads to a "sorry we can't find it, here are some suggestions..." page, with the first suggestion being the very same link, which produces the very same result. Okay, maybe I was looking for an error page.

Re:WHY THE LINK ISN'T WORKING

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like the timezone confused the SD Times. The link is working, but it's not time yet:
$ TZ='EST' date
Tue Oct 28 12:57:43 EST 2014

MPEG LA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clocks ticking MPEG LA. What are you going to do in 2016?

Re:MPEG LA?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do they have to do with HTML5?

It's Official: HTML5 Is a W3C Standard

[null etc.]

That was fast.

Not found.

[jafuser]

The article is 404'd and I'm not seeing any other news of this. Did someone jump the gun? The w3c page still says "proposed recommendation".

Re:Not found.

[Anonymous Coward]

No longer.

Who cares about the W3C

[bazmail]

They are always the last to recognize standards. Everyone else has moved on. The W3C is run like a government bureaucracy, too slow, no real-world pressures on them to up the pace, and no accountability. Who gives a shit what they elevate or recognize any more.

Re:Who cares about the W3C

[Anonymous Coward]

Even worse is the fact that they canceled work on critical HTML5 components like the FileSystem API, so today they're announcing that they're rubberstamping an incomplete standard.

Re:Who cares about the W3C

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh. No standard written by the W3C is final until there are at least two complete implementations in browsers. In addition, the W3C is composed of all the browser vendors who also write those standards.

Re:Who cares about the W3C

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. The File API is not attached to the HTML5 standard which is what this announcement would be about.

Re:Who cares about the W3C

[bazmail]

Uh No. Sure Google and MS etc have seats on the board, but it does not consist entirely of browser vendors.

Re:Who cares about the W3C

[diamondmagic]

HTML5 isn't an operating system, it's a markup language.

File API is a different specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/

You're welcome.

Re:Who cares about the W3C

[Anonymous Coward]

When your markup language lets you to write a file by sending it to a remote server and downloading it back, but not by writing it locally, then you know that something is seriously wrong.

AC talked about the discontinued FileSystem API, so the correct link would be http://www.w3.org/TR/file-system-api/ .

Re:Who cares about the W3C

[Anonymous Coward]

The way to understand the W3C vs. WHATWG is this, it's a consortium of representatives, representing every section of the tech industry, from device manufacturers, to cloud providers, to web developers, to web designers, to browser developers. It lets everyone have their say, but to do so takes time.

On the other hand, there's WHATWG, a handful of people run as a dictatorship by grand dictator Hixie where everything he says overrules and screw you if you don't like it even when some of his own people try to show he's demonstrably wrong.

China has powered ahead in recent years albeit in an often cack handed manner (some of it's rapidly built cities are falling apart after 10 years), and the West has often been slow to keep up with it in many ways. The former is like WHATWG, the latter is like W3C.

So tell me, now you know the advantages and disadvantages, where would you prefer to live? Dictatorship or democracy? That's the difference between WHATWG and W3C.

Perhaps like China vs. America, they actually complement each other well and so we need both, but one without the other? No thanks. As I'm not a beneficiary of WHATWG as they only represent browser developers and don't represent people who build the often large systems that their browsers display I'd much rather live under the W3C's democracy where no matter how small at least my voice is heard than be a peasant and a slave under WHATWG's dictatorship where my needs are ignored.

The W3C is the only one of the two that actually does have accountability - it's accountable to it's many thousands of members covering every spectrum of the industry, so you're wrong there (but ironically that's again why it takes it so long to do things- it has to try and make as many people happy as possible). WHATWG is accountable to no one but itself and it's incredibly small handful of backers so does simply what they and it want without a care for anyone else.

Sometimes slow but sure it's good, other times not so much, but it's important that the W3C remains slow but sure because that's how it makes sure everyone gets a say and how it ensures it's accountable.

Re:Who cares about the W3C

[Anonymous Coward]

How the fuck is that any different from submitting a form and getting a page back with what you filled out?

May whatever god you believe in...

[bosef1]

have mercy on your soul.

Re:May whatever god you believe in...

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the point in believing in god if you don't also believe that he will have mercy on your soul?

Windows Vista

[tepples]

Everything that can run IE 9 should be able to run IE 11/12, whatever the current versions is, I think.

To upgrade past IE 9 on Windows Vista, you have to either buy a newer version of Windows or switch to Firefox or Chrome.

Re:Windows Vista

[gstoddart]

To upgrade past IE 9 on Windows Vista, you have to either buy a newer version of Windows or switch to Firefox or Chrome

LOL ... strictly speaking, that's not "past IE 9 on Windows Vista".

That's "past Vista".

W3C's clout: they can keep DRM outside

[ciaran2014]

W3C still has an important role: they're the standards body.

We've been telling governments for years to use open standards and HTML is often held up as a shining example. A lot of governments have even made commitments to using open standards but if W3C announces that DRM is part of HTML, then governments will accept DRM and they'll think/claim they're doing what we asked with regard to open standards.

So we need to keep telling W3C that we don't want DRM in HTML. And when W3C says "Oh, but Netflix really wants DRM", we just reply that this doesn't require blessing from W3C.

FSF is almost the only organisation campaigning on this: https://www.defectivebydesign....

WHY THE LINK ISN'T WORKING

[Anonymous Coward]

The W3C was unclear about the embargo time for the news, and as a result the story has been pulled for the moment. It will be live again at 10am PST/1pm EST.

I wonder what will be added and what will be removed in the meantime...

Video rental

[tepples]

Without some form of digital restrictions management, how is movie rental supposed to work? Or is there some other way to keep end users from teeing the video into a copy that remains usable longer than the agreed-upon rental period?

Re:Video rental

[Anonymous Coward]

But they didn't standardize a form of digital restrictions management, they standardized an API to proprietary plugins that are the responsibility of the browser or platform to provide. I really wish they just told the lobbyists to fuck off and use asm.js, at least you can download and run that in any modern browser on any platform.

Re:Video rental

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, it should just work on trust. If someone is ok with renting a movie and keeping it, then they would also be ok with just pirating. No DRM on rentals would have no affect on the overall piracy rate, but would increase rental income. The prices they charge for legal movies are ridiculous, at least for people who prefer video games and TV over movies. I just don't like movies that much. So for every one movie that I actually buy, I need to pirate like 10 others to get the average cost reasonable. If they'd just let people pay whatever they want, I'd buy a lot more movies. If the prices aren't fair, your only options are piracy or abstinence. The movie studios don't seem to realize that abstinence is bad for them. The less movies I watch, the more I get used to not watching movies. My demand for movies keeps going down.

Re:Video rental

[Anonymous Coward]

Without some form of digital restrictions management, how is movie rental supposed to work? Or is there some other way to keep end users from teeing the video into a copy that remains usable longer than the agreed-upon rental period?

RTP in conjunction with SIP. Simply put, your SIP session is the rental, and can be tracked against your purchase, your account, or whatever they use to limit your use. The RTP stream delivers audio and video that can be controlled via RTCP (it's linked from that RTP article, so read it).

RTP provides no guarantees against encryption, and SIP can handle any key negotiation that could be performed by a client app. There's no need to build this shit into HTTP.

It's Not God-Damned Rocket Science(tm).

Re:Video rental

[AikonMGB]

Let me fix that for you: why is movie rental supposed to work? Just because a business model made sense at one point for a particular medium does that mean that it will continue to do so moving forward, nor that artificial restrictions should be placed on innovation to force existing business models to soldier on.

Re:Video rental

[tepples]

SIP can handle any key negotiation that could be performed by a client app.

For which platform would this client app be developed? Not everybody who wants to offer a video for rental has the resources to develop 15 different client apps and negotiate with Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony for inclusion in their respective app stores.

Re:Video rental

[tepples]

For movies other than cult classics and children's animated movies, I imagine that most people prefer to watch a movie only once, not multiple times for the indefinite future. People don't want to buy stuff anymore. So just to make sure I don't misunderstand your post, let me restate it in my own words: In the interest of eliminating digital restrictions management, you expect people to pay full price to buy a durable copy even if they want to watch it only once. Do I understand you correctly?

Re: Video rental

[Anonymous Coward]

RTP, SDP, etc are the building blocks of WebRTC. Including encryption.

Re:Video rental

[tilk]

Right now there is no difference between a "durable copy", as you say, than just watching - in both cases exactly the same data needs to go between the service provider and the end user. Therefore there is no longer a need to distinguish the two, and anything else is just crippling the product - a questionable practice for physical items, but somehow okay for digital data.

A message for the media companies: just let me pay for the damn file! I'm probably going to only watch it once, but if I do not, you should not care anyway.

Re:Video rental

[Xtifr]

Without some form of digital restrictions management, how is movie rental supposed to work?

DRM currently works without being part of the HTML standard. (See, e.g., Netflix.) Why would not including it in a newer version of the HTML standard suddenly make it stop working?

Re:Video rental

[Anonymous Coward]

It must really be painful to be on a project with you... what with you not caring what the business problem is and all.

Re:Video rental

[ultranova]

For movies other than cult classics and children's animated movies, I imagine that most people prefer to watch a movie only once, not multiple times for the indefinite future.

If this is true, then there's no real reason to worry about someone cluttering their hard drive with video files they're never going to watch again, now is there?

Re:Video rental

[tepples]

Movie studios have traditionally price discriminated, offering a limited viewing window at a lower price than an indefinite window.

Re:Video rental

[ultranova]

Movie studios have traditionally price discriminated, offering a limited viewing window at a lower price than an indefinite window.

Which, according to yourself, are the exact same product as far as the consumer is concerned. Either those gosh darn pirates keep defenseless widdle DRM-free rentals forever so they don't have to shell out for a "durable copy" or it's extremely important that rentals exist because people don't want to watch movies more than once (altough it's still unclear why video rentals should be a concern for Web standards, seeing how rental stores can and probably should simply deliver such precious content through some proprietary program rather than assume various third-party ones honour their wishes). You can't have it both ways.

Not that any of this matters, since anyone so inclined will simply break any DRM or just grab the content from Pirate Bay. At this point copyright law has all the credibility and respectability communism has in the former DDR.

Re:Video rental

[Rakarra]

Therefore there is no longer a need to distinguish the two, and anything else is just crippling the product

Copyright has always been about crippling what the non-copyright-holder can do with a product. That's its entire purpose, and has been that way for hundreds of years. It's not new compared to digital media.

Re:Video rental

[Anonymous Coward]

Who gives a fuck?

DVD's and Blu-ray discs are trivially easy to copy bit for bit, negating the need to circumvent any encryption.

Re:Video rental

[Anonymous Coward]

At first I thought you were a troll, now I know you are a technically illiterate shitheel.

Re:Video rental

[tepples]

Please quit with the ad hominems and state what in my post makes me "a technically illiterate shitheel."

Re: Video rental

[tepples]

I thought the "encryption" in WebRTC was to keep eavesdroppers from saving a stream, not to keep the subscriber from saving a stream.

Weasel words

[Anonymous Coward]

"recommendation" status as their highest level of endorsement?

Talk about weasel words, the W3C is worse than the damn lawyers.

The old and the new. (H.265/HEVC)

[westlake]

Clocks ticking MPEG LA. What are you going to do in 2016?

The 50" 4K UHD TV is at Walmart, starting at $1300. MPEG LA has moved on.

Re:The old and the new. (H.265/HEVC)

[Anonymous Coward]

I use three of these 4K displays with my PC. At $340 each, they are a great deal.

Re:The old and the new. (H.265/HEVC)

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

at 30" I'm going to need a much bigger desk.

I can't wait for those ridiculously high DPI panels to scale up. I want a 21" 4k display at 120 Hz.

I also want a pony.

Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

[oever]

Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

Answer: there is no schema. Validating documents seems to have gone out of fashion. Writing a parser for HTML5 is extremely difficult. Basically the broken parsing behavior of old browsers is now standardized in a crazy arcane description of how to parse HTML5 documents.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/syn...

Who benefits from such crazy parsing rules? The current browsers. This raises the bar for entry.

Re:Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Actually the current browsers have a lot to lose with crazy parsing rules. Lots of edge cases, writing lots of nasty hacks to get around various markup bugs...

Even it does mean higher bar of entry, the bar's pretty high anyway because even if we did have schema parsing, the render piece really is the hard part.

Who does this benefit? Lazy crappy godawful web developers.

Re:Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

[DarkOx]

Who benefits from such crazy parsing rules?

But so do end users who want to view existing pages and anyone with existing pages but perhaps not terribly well designed and implemented web pages / applications.

There is so much tag soup out there, its hard to image some new schema validating strict rendering browser being very useful out side of the leading ecom sites. The fact is lots of really valuable information is still sitting around on home pages at universities and elsewhere on personal blogs etc that is a mess of barely parse-able tags; yet todays browsers by and large to a fabulous job presenting those documents all things considered.

A new clean standard and an new clean reference browser to go with it might be great for buying airline tickets, and ordering widgets but we would give up so much.

Why do think there was such an effort to mirror geocities? There was a lot of interesting things there long forgotten by many and their original owners in amongst the chaff. Not sure we want to say goodby to that history.

Re: Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote a lexer in C which follows the spec. Only took a week or less.

IMO it's the tree construction that's a bear. And because they eschewed XHTML2 and namespaces, the treatment of MathML, SVG, and other external tag collections is insanely ugly and downright cobfusing, not to mention it means your parser will never be finished because they're constantly tweaking the rules for existing or new tags.

Re:Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do think there was such an effort to mirror geocities? There was a lot of interesting things there long forgotten by many and their original owners in amongst the chaff. Not sure we want to say goodby to that history.

Amen, Neocities allows HTML5 to thrive! Examples include SVG filters on a text header (and allowing SVG code alongside HTML code), web fonts, RDFa Lite attributes for SEO, IndexedDB for client-side searching, CSS variables for storing data URIs of images, populating autocomplete datalists from data-* attributes and the dataset API, async and defer attributes for scripts, Web Workers and Promises, CSS transitions and animation, media queries for adaptive menu sizing, the source tag allowing the browser to pick which version of audio it can play natively, the rel attribute for specifying a CC license and for preventing the browser from sending a referer header when clicking links, discretionary font ligatures, and ARIA attributes for accessibility

Re:Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost forgot! .. and the <template> tag!

Re:Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

[spiralx]

But it's easier to parse HTML5 than it was any previous version of HTML, as there is now an actual specification which details the process exactly rather than relying on each browser's interpretation. It can't be that difficult given the number of working parsers and validators out there for HTML5.

Plus, HTML5 can already be written using XML syntax, aka XHTML5. And searching for xhtml5.xsd or xhtml5.rng gave me plenty of links to schemas for validating XML-syntax HTML5.

If you need to store validated documents, then you shouldn't be storing them in HTML format! Store them as XML documents with well-defined schemas (Relax NG of course!), and then use XSLT or possibly XQuery to turn them into HTML fragments for display.

Re:Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

[Anonymous Coward]

"But it's easier to parse HTML5 than it was any previous version of HTML"

Right, excluding the XML based implementations of HTML of course which could be parsed by pretty much every device and framework on the planet out the box due to them all containing XML parsers.

"It can't be that difficult given the number of working parsers and validators out there for HTML5."

It's apparently difficult enough that even the browser developers who were the ones funding WHATWG to produce this awful spec themselves can't even consistently implement it because despite their claims to the contrary, web browsers are now more fragmented than ever.

"Plus, HTML5 can already be written using XML syntax, aka XHTML5. And searching for xhtml5.xsd or xhtml5.rng gave me plenty of links to schemas for validating XML-syntax HTML5."

Sure and that should be encouraged, but Ian Hickson has an irrational hatred of XML and has been actively discouraging it meaning we're seeing a trend towards bad markup rather than a trend towards good markup being encouraged by the very person who is now defacto in charge of this important web standard.

"If you need to store validated documents, then you shouldn't be storing them in HTML format!"

It's not about storage, it's about interop. The more sites there are putting out validated XML the more interoperable the web is. The most sites putting out HTML5 there are, the less interoperable the web is.

That's why the GP is correct- WHATWG's hijacking of HTML was a browser landgrab. People think the browser wars died with Microsoft/Netscape. They didn't - WHATWG's formation was done wholly to kill off IE and now IE's marketshare has plumetted towards irrelevant they're all trying to screw each other, that's why we had some browsers pushing VP8, others pushing X264, and others refusing both. It's why we've seen battles over DRM and Do Not Track, all trying to argue one way or the other in often the most nonsensical ways. They're all trying to fuck each other and take control of the web for themselves.

Re:Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that there's another type of web developer, the competent and skilled type, and to them this is a kick in the teeth because they're basically being told by browser vendors that they now all have to tend towards the lowest common denominator.

So instead of the browser folks saying "screw you, you just need to skill up, or start using tools that do the "hard" bits for you like Wordpress, Drupal et. al." to the incompetents they said "Okay guys, let's do it your shit way, because hey you're so useful to the world".

It's stupid through and through.

Re:Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

[Anonymous Coward]

PHP abominations such as Drupal and Wordpress spit out shitty, incorrect, HTML that can't pass through the validator without tons of errors and warnings.

Re:Where's the schema (DTD/XML Schema/Relax NG)?

[Anonymous Coward]

The anal retentive computer scientist in me really wants renderers to stop on errors and spit out a sarcastic message to the user telling them that the "web devs" who designed the page sucks and therefore you can not view the page.

It would greatly simplify the renderers and improve the web as all crappy web pages would effectively be deleted for the web.

Allowing an HTML rendering program to accept any and all incorrect tags and usages is akin to GCC running into syntax errors and compiling anyway just guessing what the programmer meant. Wouldn't that be fun?

On the other hand, as you noted a lot of old and crappy web pages with useful information are still useful to the reader.

I am from the school of thought that all errors and warnings, whether in a web page or in a computer program are 100% unacceptable and dirty builds are always rejected.

but weasely standards body

[Anonymous Coward]

W3C still has an important role: they're the standards body.

As a standards body they need to show some balls and use stronger wording than recommendation. Calling your final specification a recommendation is nothing more than weasel wordy

DRM 1, Freedom 0

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, shit!

What!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was a standard already, because it's on W3School!

Oops, 43px.

[CrashNBrn]

Damn, 43px, ( 21 + 5x2 + 5x2 + 1x2 ). See just plain bullshit.

DRM (unfortunately) can exist without W3C blessing

[ciaran2014]

> Without some form of digital restrictions management,
> how is movie rental supposed to work?

DRM can exist without W3C's blessing. The big players can even agree on a common interface without W3C's blessing.

My previous comment wasn't about whether DRM should exist (in my opinion, it shouldn't), it was about W3C not needing to bless DRM and call it part of an "open standard".

There's no contradiction in DRM-accepters supporting the campaign to get DRM removed from W3C's specifications of open standards.

Re:Not even remotely correct

[qpqp]

Kiddo, get off our lawn and RTFM. You ain't got a clue what the parent is talking about.

Barrier to entry

[tepples]

Why would not including it in a newer version of the HTML standard suddenly make it stop working?

It wouldn't stop working, but needing to develop new apps for multiple platforms currently acts as a barrier to entry to new video providers. Right now each video provider needs a separate app for each client platform, and each client platform needs a separate app for each video provider. This is a Cartesian product situation, which grows at O(n^2). If you have 15 platforms and 15 providers, you need 225 apps. Standardizing digital restrictions management for video would allow the use of one app on each platform.

Re:Barrier to entry

[Xtifr]

It wouldn't stop working, but needing to develop new apps for multiple platforms currently acts as a barrier to entry to new video providers.

That's a reasonable argument for standardizing encryption/DRM, but not a reasonable argument for making it part of the HTML standard. Rolling your own encryption is indeed a crappy idea, but the solution is to create an encryption/drm standard, rather than hijacking some only-vaguely-related standard and trying to cram it in there. Especially since encryption/drm needs to work with more than just html.

any move in favour of the open web is a great one

[adsyme]

Great news! I'm a strong html5/javascript advocate. 6 months ago, I released a mobile WEB app to create mobile web apps (http://adsy.me). We've already signed up 22,300 users, a pretty nice proof of concept for an open web project, outside the native walled gardens. It works on ios/ANDROID/pc, a true cross-platform app. I believe it's the future, in a post-appstores era (here is a piece I wrote about this: https://medium.com/@adsy_me/7-...)

Clean browser

[FreedomFirstThenPeac]

Meanwhile, I am toying with creating a pre-browser or embedded filter that removes all tags beyond what Slashdot permits, then feeds that reduced set to the display functions. I am sick and tired of trying to throttle back wacko behavior one fekking feature at a time. Or does such already exist (for Firefox or Chrome?)