[riedel]

Funny to see Google and Mozilla siding on ethical issues. It really seems like the W3C has finally lost its compass and now wants to venture into the blockchain. Only positive thing is to see Google loosing once in a standards fight, however, I think it might just have been the wrong anarchist endeavour inside the W3C. In the end we will get more centralisation because looks like nobody except the big ones can push standards on a technical decent level (indirectly pushing their agenda).

[dragonwriter]

> Funny to see Google and Mozilla siding on ethical issues

It's not the first time Google and Mozilla sided together against the W3C on web standards, and the last notable time resulted, over time, in the W3C ultimately being displaced from any role in the HTML and DOM standards.

The standards group that implementers listen to (which, for some reason, seems to be the one that listens to implementers, when there are competing options) is the only one that matters, in practice.

[oluoluoxenfree]

> It's not the first time Google and Mozilla sided together against the W3C on web standards, and the last notable time resulted, over time, in the W3C ultimately being displaced from any role in the HTML and DOM standards.

By who?

[zdragnar]

WHATWG, though I recall that Apple and Opera were equally influential in the move.

[dragonwriter]

WHATWG

https://whatwg.org/

[espadrine]

> Only positive thing is to see Google loosing once in a standards fight

It is far from the first time. For instance, Google was involved in the WHATWG, which developed the HTML standard while the W3C pushed XHTML.

The standards war, itself, is only lost when nearly nobody uses the standard, which is what happened to XHTML, which lost to WHATWG’s HTML when browsers simply didn’t use XHTML.

It sounds like a lot of cryptocurrency companies wish to prop up this standard, but it is not clear to me that actual people would use it for a non-circular goal.

[mark_and_sweep]

> browsers simply didn’t use XHTML

Do you mean "developers didn't use XHTML"?

All browsers implement XHTML. It's referred to as "the second concrete syntax for HTML" in the WHATWG spec.[1]

Indeed many websites do use XHTML, the HTML application of XML. However, since proper documents render identically, you won't be aware that you're visiting an XHTML site - that is, unless you check the source.

Fun history side note: Browsers like Netscape and Internet Explorer didn't agree on how to parse HTML in the past. They handled omitability differently, for example, in overlapping hierarchies (<p><b></p></b>). To fix this mess, Sir Tim asked well-respected SGML practicioners to create a clean subset of SGML and define a document type definition (DTD) for HTML. They came up with XML, the clean subset, and XHTML, the DTD. [2]

Basically, XHTML was the first actual standardization of HTML. Unfortunately, minor syntax errors will prevent a XHTML document from rendering, which, to some degree, is probably why it was never widely accepted by developers.

[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/introduction.html#htm...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dYwEyjZcY

[anjbe]

> All browsers implement XHTML.

Internet Explorer did not. It completely refused to render XHTML pages served with an XML MIME type (application/xhtml+xml). It would only display pages if they were served with the text/html MIME type, which meant that none of XML’s vaunted features (such as strict parsing) came into play, and such pages were effectively treated as “HTML with syntax errors.”

A big part of why WHATWG was able to dethrone W3C was W3C’s insistence on dropping HTML in favor of XHTML when the overwhelmingly dominant browser of the time had zero support for it.

> They came up with XML, the clean subset, and XHTML, the DTD. … Basically, XHTML was the first actual standardization of HTML.

No, the first formal HTML standard was 2.0 (RFC 1866), which was released in November 1995 and had a DTD that among other things disallowed overlapping hierarchies. XML’s first draft was released a full year later (November 1996), and the first W3C spec was XML 1.0 in 1998. Later that year came the initial drafts for XHTML 1.0, which was a straightforward translation of HTML 4.0 to XML.

[bawolff]

In context, the xml serialization of html5 is not what is being referred to.

Although you are right that the issue was more user acceptability and not implementor willingness.