[drvortex]

Standards are irrelevant to pragmatism. De facto standards are what is important.

By virture of sheer popularity, Chrome is the de facto standard. And if they have provided anything that becomes useful or popular, then by virtue of popularity of that feature in what is already the post popular browser, makes that feature part of the de facto standard.

The post is just pedantic whining about how something isn't according to the written word in some document written some years ago by a bunch of people that the average user of the standard does not even know.

I understand the value of standardization. Everything should be standardized. But what the standard should be is completely another question. I would say that all enhancements/popular features should be standard. At least that way, we'll have more people happier, rather than follow the least common denominator approach where there is a compromise that leaves no one happy.

[chriskrycho]

Not only did I not whine about something in a written document, I never once mentioned WHATWG or anything other standards body. (That was intentional.) I explicitly call out the vendors and their mutual implementations. The "standard" I care about is the truly living standard of what every browser implements. The point here is that the _de facto_ standard is not Chrome, and if it were that'd be a bad thing. (We've been there before; it was a bad thing.)

[jrochkind1]

Every browser has never implemented exactly the same things in exactly the same ways, and never will. There will always, at least, be bugs.

A "de facto standard" of "what browsers implement" is no standard at all. This is why standards matter. "What the actually existing software implements" is what you have when you _don't have standards_.

The vendor-dominated, standard-changes-every-day WHATWG "living standard" is relevant to the situation here, I think, even if you'd rather it not be. If it's a living standard that's always changing, and it's specifically changing based on _what software does_... then Chrome doing something seems like as much of a standard as anything. It may or may not be added to the standard the next day, but the standard seems to encourage people to use things that aren't in it yet.

The WHATWG process, if I understand it right, specifically requires (at least) two browser vendors to implement a thing _before_ it's added to the standard. Yes, two is more than one. But not a lot more. :)

[alwillis]

Every browser has never implemented exactly the same things in exactly the same ways, and never will.

Igalia implemented CSS Grid for both Blink and WebKit: https://blogs.igalia.com/mrego/2017/03/16/css-grid-layout-is...

And remember, Blink is a fork of WebKit, so they're not very different. So it can be done and we need more of this.

They're also working on some other stuff for Apple and Google. Never say never.

[JohnBooty]

The practical upshot of what you're saying is that the browser vendor with the biggest market share can do whatever the heck they want, and everybody else can either reverse-engineer it or eat dirt.

I'd tell you why you're so spectacularly wrong, but since we've already lived through the nightmare you're currently endorsing... instead I'll simply refer you to the 1990s and early 2000s.

You don't want that.

[dubbel]

Depends on who your target audience is.

Germany for example uses 38.22% Chrome and 31.11% Firefox on Desktops. No way you can speak about a de facto standard here.

I, as an end user, don't know about industry standards for screws, magnet strips or pipelines either, but that doesn't make them less important.

We already tried giving a commercial company free reign in this regard, with Microsoft and it's Internet Explorer, and it did not end well. I see no reason to try this again.

Standards also just make it easier for new players to enter the browser market, instead of having to reverse engineer how Google does stuff, so Standards even help with competition.

I will happily discuss current shortcomings of the W3C and standardization process in general, but we shouldn't repeat the past.

[pjmlp]

Same could be said for IE, but then Microsoft isn't a HN darling so it gets bashed, while Google gets praised for doing exactly the same.

[drvortex]

Oh yes. The same could be said about IE. In fact, I personally have no problems with IE implementing new features. The problem with IE was never that it was standards-incompliant. Heck, they were the de facto standard and there software used even today that won't run on anything but IE.

The problem with IE was that it was a shitty bloated browser. And to be honest, nothing shook its dominance before Chrome. Not even Firefox.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Chrome isn't the de facto standard, it doesn't have complete dominance of the web yet so you also have to support, at the very least, Safari.

[drvortex]

No, it doesn't have complete dominance. But it has more share than all the other players combined. https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

That is a dominating position making it the de facto standard, even if not absolute.