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by jrochkind1
2573 days ago
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If they choose "not to ratify" something... will it have any effect on browser behavior at all? I don't think so. It'd just be a standard none of the relevant software cares about. Pretty useless to anyone. (Much like current W3C html standards...) Seems to me W3C will straight up be acting as administrative staff for WHATWG, providing free labor to do the "hard parts" of providing a useful standard, without much decision-making ability. Without much decision-making ability is indeed the status quo. Now they're providing some free labor too. But it's certainly less pointless than what they were doing before, so. |
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W3C has no authority to change browser behavior, no. But they CAN influence browser behavior by providing expert assistance to promote W3C's traditional values (accessibility, internationalization, privacy, etc.) in WHATWG.
We'll have to see if W3C's ratification or not has an impact on the larger web ecosystem, but it would probably get key customers' (and regulators) attention if W3C refused to ratify changes to HTML, DOM, etc. on accesibility or privacy grounds. Browser developers may respect W3C's supposed authority to set standards, but they definitely do respect the opinions of customers and authority of regulators.