• jarfil@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    organizations like W3C and IEEE that define standards for how the internet works and how websites behave

    Too bad those organizations kept dragging their feet, writing standards by committee and making them unimplementable, pushing stuff like XHTML that nobody in their sane mind wanted… until the WHATWG called quits on them and focused on a working living standard: a reference free open source browser that anyone could just copy+paste to meet the standard.

    Nowadays we call that “Chromium”.

    • Rakn@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      No actually we don’t. Chromium isn’t a reference implementation. And while XHTML was handled poorly the idea behind it was actually very interesting. Didn’t pan out and was buried years ago. So what.

      • jarfil@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Chromium isn’t a reference implementation

        Could fool me, since it implements all WHATWG standards… or is it the other way around?

        XHTML didn’t just “not pan out”; the W3C kept beating its dead horse carcass, like it did with many others. The W3C didn’t pan out and was handled poorly, even though the idea behind it was actually very interesting.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Why do you believe Google would not be able to ignore the WHATWG the same way they could ignore other standards organizations if they controlled the entire browser market?

      • jarfil@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Well, for starters the WHATWG listens to Google, not the other way around. And yeah, they do “control” the entire “browser market”, or more precisely, the part they care about: how to show ads.

          • jarfil@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            That’s one way of seeing it.

            I don’t agree with the W3C or IEEE defining the standards anymore, or with Chromium becoming a “de facto” standard; the whole point of creating the WHATWG was to explicitly ditch the W3C, make Chromium into the basis for a living standard… and everyone clapped (except for some die hards who didn’t get the memo).

            • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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              1 year ago

              Yeah, I see, I was just trying to list some examples of such standardization bodies I’m talking about. Don’t view it as some implicit approval over others I didn’t mention.