5 ms·

i thought that HTML spec is immutable.

by varbhat 1y ago

tommica 1y ago
Yep, doesn't this make certain pages not work anymore?
- onion2k 1y ago
  It makes them not work in Chrome. For any application that supports XSLT they'll continue to work fine.
- therealmarv 1y ago
  it will. It will make old non-updated pages break with same fate as old outdated pages which used MathML in the past and were not updated with polyfills.
  - mananaysiempre 1y ago
    FYI, MathML is currently shipping (again, after all these years) in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari[1]. [1] https://mathml.igalia.com/ https://mathml.igalia.com/
JimDabell 1y ago
The WHATWG HTML spec. is famously mutable. They literally call it a “living standard” and it separates them from the versioned W3C standard.
maxloh 1y ago
The HTML spec is actually constantly evolving. New features like the dialog element [0] and popover [1] were added every year. But removing something from the spec is very rare, if it ever happened before. [0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/dialog https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Global_attributes/popover https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
troupo 1y ago
It's immutable in the sense of "only remove stuff after incredibly careful consideration". Which Chrome has transmuted into "we do whatever we want to do". Remember their attempt to remove confirm/prompt?
meindnoch 1y ago
Here's the HTML spec: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/ https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/
- maxloh 1y ago
  An implementation with >90% market share becomes the defacto standard.
  - anonymars 1y ago
    Who else is watching this who grew up watching this same movie play out with Microsoft/IE as the villain and Google as the hero? (Anyone want to make the "live long enough" quote?)
redwall_hp 1y ago
The W3C spec was. But WHATWG and HTML5 represent a coup by the dominant browser corporations (read: Google). The biggest browser dictates the "living standard" and the W3C is forced into a descriptivist role. The W3C's plan was for HTML4 to be replaced by XHTML. What we commonly call HTML5 is the WHATWG "HTML Living Standard."
- arccy 1y ago
  the old sages in ivory towers handed us a spec engraved in stone and expected is to live by it no wonder they were sidelined
  - WorldMaker 1y ago
    They weren't sidelined because they had bad ideas (XHTML 2.0 had a lot of great ideas, many of which HTML5 eventually "borrowed"), they were sidelined because they still saw the web as primarily a document platform and Google especially was trying to push it as a larger application platform. It wasn't a battle between the ivory tower and practical concerns, it was a proxy battle in the general war between the web as a place optimized to link between meaningful, accessibility-first documents and the web as a place to host generalized applications with accessibility often an afterthought. (ARIA is great, but ARIA can only do so much, not as much of it by default/a pit of success as XHTML 2.0 once hoped to be.)

i thought that HTML spec is immutable.

tommica 1y ago

Yep, doesn't this make certain pages not work anymore?

onion2k 1y ago
It makes them not work in Chrome. For any application that supports XSLT they'll continue to work fine.
therealmarv 1y ago
it will. It will make old non-updated pages break with same fate as old outdated pages which used MathML in the past and were not updated with polyfills.
- mananaysiempre 1y ago
  FYI, MathML is currently shipping (again, after all these years) in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari[1]. [1] https://mathml.igalia.com/ https://mathml.igalia.com/

JimDabell 1y ago

The WHATWG HTML spec. is famously mutable. They literally call it a “living standard” and it separates them from the versioned W3C standard.

maxloh 1y ago

The HTML spec is actually constantly evolving. New features like the dialog element [0] and popover [1] were added every year. But removing something from the spec is very rare, if it ever happened before. [0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/dialog https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Global_attributes/popover https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

troupo 1y ago

It's immutable in the sense of "only remove stuff after incredibly careful consideration". Which Chrome has transmuted into "we do whatever we want to do". Remember their attempt to remove confirm/prompt?

meindnoch 1y ago

Here's the HTML spec: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/ https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/

maxloh 1y ago
An implementation with >90% market share becomes the defacto standard.
- anonymars 1y ago
  Who else is watching this who grew up watching this same movie play out with Microsoft/IE as the villain and Google as the hero? (Anyone want to make the "live long enough" quote?)

redwall_hp 1y ago

The W3C spec was. But WHATWG and HTML5 represent a coup by the dominant browser corporations (read: Google). The biggest browser dictates the "living standard" and the W3C is forced into a descriptivist role. The W3C's plan was for HTML4 to be replaced by XHTML. What we commonly call HTML5 is the WHATWG "HTML Living Standard."

arccy 1y ago
the old sages in ivory towers handed us a spec engraved in stone and expected is to live by it no wonder they were sidelined
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  They weren't sidelined because they had bad ideas (XHTML 2.0 had a lot of great ideas, many of which HTML5 eventually "borrowed"), they were sidelined because they still saw the web as primarily a document platform and Google especially was trying to push it as a larger application platform. It wasn't a battle between the ivory tower and practical concerns, it was a proxy battle in the general war between the web as a place optimized to link between meaningful, accessibility-first documents and the web as a place to host generalized applications with accessibility often an afterthought. (ARIA is great, but ARIA can only do so much, not as much of it by default/a pit of success as XHTML 2.0 once hoped to be.)