[mikewest]

The web is the common project, right? We're all working together to put together powerful and performant windows into the web, and we work together at places like the W3C and WhatWG to construct a common vision of what that means.

Diversity in implementation is a great way of hammering out the exact contours of the standards that govern the common project...

[coldtea]

>The web is the common project, right? We're all working together to put together powerful and performant windows into the web, and we work together at places like the W3C and WhatWG to construct a common vision of what that means.

No, we (the companies) don't.

We work to get web features that we can leverage.

If we can get away with them being adopted by everybody but solely controlled by us, it's all the merrier. If we can get away with keeping some features to ourselves as a competitive advantage ditto.

If we can push our agenda and standards instead of collaborating and iterating faster on common ones, that's great too.

We (the companies) could care less about the web, in any way in which it doesn't affect our bottom line.

In fact, if we have to stall the Web's progress to protect some of our own investments and offerings, we're all for it.

Also, if we have to stall the Web's progress just to avoid some competitor getting his stuff adopted and standardized first, we're all for it.

[jmillikin]

Please tell me who the "we" is in your post, so I can take great care to avoid ever working for them.

[coldtea]

>Please tell me who the "we" is in your post

Well, it's not like I haven't added the notice "(the companies)" after "we" twice.

By which "companies" (something also clear from the context), I mean Apple, MS, Google etc, the companies working on rendering engines and browser.

I used "we" to adopt the parent comment's use of "we" and his idea of the web as a common project all those companies share.

>so I can take great care to avoid ever working for them.

Well, since you already work for Google, it's understandable you seeing this as silly and thinking they are all for open and the web's progress.

I don't think that's the general perception people have of Google though -- nor that it is correct.

[thedragon4453]

Yeah, I don't really trust this. I don't see how:

"We're doing our own thing that we totally control and will likely only show up in our products"

is better than

"We're contributing to one of the best/most successful opensource projects around and thereby making the web better for people across devices and platforms".

for anyone other than Google.

[hkmurakami]

You probably just need to go join Mozilla imo.

[hp50g]

Pfft. The Web is run by businesses, not some star trek style council where everyone speaks in turn and there is a common good.

WhatWG was formed because the W3C design by committee approach was too slow for some businesses to gain an advantage.

W3C is a paid up list of various exchange top 500 companies who can afford to pay up for standards.

It's a giant pissing match.

[doe88]

This is a fallacious argument in this context, this is a pretext, that's why I used the word 'hypocrisy'. And also I really think that a so called 'diversity' of implementations of open source projects may only really be sustainable for large companies with big resources to do things on their own and know they don't need to rely on anybody. But ask yourself, now, what if Apple decided that for being competitive with Google they must do the same thing and ditch everything that don't suit to their plans? And what if Samsung does the same and Blackberry and so on... would it be great for diversity? Would it be great for small vendors? I don't think so. Excuse me but in this case I don't praise this kind of diversity.

Edit: I didn't know I replied to a Google employee, just s/Google/your company/ in my post.

[jmillikin]

  > But ask yourself, now, what if Apple decided that for
  > being competitive with Google they must do the same
  > thing and ditch everything that don't suit to their
  > plans?

They did, remember? WebKit was an open-source rendering engine that Apple secretly forked, worked on in private, and then released as a new project. At the time, people were quite upset that Apple hadn't simply adopted an extant dominant open-source engine (Gecko).

Looking back, Apple's choice to go their own way was obviously beneficial both for themselves and for the web in general.

[lawnchair_larry]

How has history proven that what Apple did was "obviously" better than using Gecko?

[pyre]

I think that the point being made is that we now have 3 popular rendering engines loose on the web: WebKit, Trident, and Gecko. This diversity and competition gives us a much better ecosystem to work within than even the dual culture of IE* / Gecko.

* Trident might not even exist if not for the significant competition (or the name might not be the same were history changed).

[doe88]

@jmillikin

I remember they contributed back to the KHTML project by releasing a patch. Do your employer plan to release a patch back to Webkit? And you also seem to forget that back then there wasn't as many small vendors as there are today. Gecko never was much used outside of Mozilla, which is of course very different for Webkit.

[makomk]

Errrm, Apple did the bare minimum required by the license of the KHTML code they were using, which was to release the changes they'd made to KHTML as a single blob. It looks like Google has already done more to contribute back than Apple originally did.

[doe88]

Would be great if they answered this question though https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-April/024...

[angryasian]

>W3C and WhatWG to construct a common vision of what that means.

all you have to look at is the history of html5 and even the issues surrounding things like video to see what its like to decide by committee.

WHATWG published the First Public Working Draft of the specification on 22 January 2008

In May 2011, the working group advanced HTML5 to "Last Call

As of May 2012, the specification is back to Working Draft state at the W3C

In September 2012, the W3C proposed a plan[28] to release a stable HTML5 Recommendation by the end of 2014