[harles]

> you can't make a feature until everyone agrees

Except that’s exactly how the web is supposed to work and the reason Google was able to build a giant search business in the first place. This is absolutely them shitting in the punch bowl. We made plenty of progress without fragmentation.

[dragonwriter]

> Except that’s exactly how the web is supposed to work and the reason Google was able to build a giant search business in the first place.

No, because whether or not that's how the web is supposed (by whom?) to work, it is not how it did in fact work when Google built that business, in fact, it's farther from how it worked in the period Google was building a giant search business than it is now.

[ajross]

> ["you can't make a feature until everyone agrees" is] exactly how the web is supposed to work

That's just wildly incorrect as a matter of history. To first approximation every technology we use was implemented via Netscape and Microsoft jamming features in as fast as they could and implementing ones from their competitor only once it was clear they were reaching adoption. The interest in a "standards process" really only showed up after the turn of the millenium, once Netscape had faded and IE had begun to stagnate. And in fact Chrome was by far the biggest driver of this change.

[strongpigeon]

In a sense though, the WHATWG was fragmentation and was what helped move the web forward after the W3C got too slow and hard to get anything through… Requiring consensus to add anything to the web is how progress will slow down to a crawl and we have precedent for this. The current process seems pretty good IMO

[zer00eyz]

The whole point of a slower moving standard is that you are less likely to fuck yourself.

Plan Ahea

d

At some point whatwg is going to jump the shark. They are going to feature paint themselves into a corner and have to make the choice of "cut off some chunk of the web" or "go forward on a new stack". The all gas no brakes add features like were a start up forget about thoughtful or engineering is a bad way to sustain something.

[joshuamorton]

> They are going to feature paint themselves into a corner and have to make the choice of "cut off some chunk of the web"

This of course is actually much more likely (and functionally happened) with pre-WHATWG standards because they'd standardize things that were infeasible and no browser ever implemented, ever.

And at the same time everyone had their own weird nonstandard extensions (does no one remember the whacky stuff like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Vendor_Pre... and how absolutely garbage-awful it was for maintainability?)

[talldayo]

> They are going to feature paint themselves into a corner

Has the web not done that, several times over at this point? We've lost too many online standards to count, from all of the FAANG vendors.

> The all gas no brakes add features like were a start up forget about thoughtful or engineering is a bad way to sustain something.

If native smartphone runtimes were not complete dogshit, I'd probably agree with you. Without the industry's cooperation though, expanding the lowest-common-denominator platform was an inevitability. People want emulators, game streaming, proper download management, the real features that the OEMs are too afraid to publish. If they won't provide that, then their users will find another way.

And so, these "all gas no brakes" features are a product of legitimate demand. It's sad, yeah; but what's even sadder is the miserly behavior from companies like Apple that market user freedom as a security apocalypse. The openness of the web has finally caught-up with it's most-restricted users.

[joshuamorton]

I think you're misremembering, there's functionally never been a time when any browser implemented only the standards. Fragmentation was much worse in the pre chrome era.

Sometimes you had standards, but they were often misimplemented because they were bad, the whatwg process is vastly less bad, since it keeps the beta features in beta and no single browser can force them through popularity alone.