The W3C has endangered long-term resilience on the Web by supporting misguided efforts like EME, which aim to add a requirement for de-facto proprietary "plugins" to the open Web platform. Why should they deserve our support?
The W3C has no control over whether browsers implement support for DRM, they just wrote a document that says if you do the API should look like this. It was going to happen regardless.
The actual argument is that the W3C has absolutely zero teeth because they couldn’t stop EME even if they wanted to and therefore are irrelevant compared to WHATWG.
There's more to it. The EME API is useless without the undocumented proprietary plug-in side (called CDM in the spec). It has no technical purpose. It's only to "standards-wash" an entirely closed DRM by Google (and everyone else's proprietary DRMs).
The spec contains diagrams and descriptions that have been acknowledged by its authors to be factually incorrect. EME pretends to be an in-browser thing, rather than hardware+kernel "hard" DRM. The spec proponents stated that they'll never use the scheme in the spec, and the "hard" DRM is the key feature they're after.
There have been a lot of process shenanigans: e.g. during likely the biggest disagreement in the history of W3C, the chair of the HTML WG announced that there is a consensus in the group about EME, and it can proceed further. Then the EME part has been moved out of public HTML WG to a closed-doors group.
So it wasn't merely Google+Netflix saying "we'll do it anyway". It was a subversion and corruption of the W3C itself.
Let's begin with a polite thank you for your service, a hot drink, maybe some type of certificate of acknowledgment that says like "you were present." and then call it day.
But beyond that, in my opinion, W3C has been a disaster since day 1. It seems like some people with good intentions decided one day they could just play RFC roulette and maybe if they slipped enough nonsense into their content that nobody would notice, and we would just all play along and build the misshapen web they were imagining.
Maybe if they had met us halfway and actually shown us the web they were imagining somewhere somehow it might have been easier to get on board, but whenever I tried to look at any of their standards, it was just endless detail with no explanation of why anybody would want to do any of this.
Large players come and go. Chrome is at the head now because MS rested on their laurels and IE's performance rotted enough for a new player to take them on in market-share.
I don't particularly see a new large player come in the browser space, though. Creating a browser from scratch is a huge untertaking and the fact that everyone except Google, Mozilla, and Apply have given up is testament to that.
Edge (Legacy) was a decent browser, but keeping up even with still missing Web APIs proved too expensive (alongside fixing bugs). Safari may be in the same pickle these days with apparently a sizeable backlog of missing features and incompatible implementations. Granted, that may also be due to many developers assuming Chrome to be a reference implementation.
If a new player comes along I'd guess it will be based on Blink, but they would probably need more resources than Google can throw at Chrome. And a way to finance them ... there's probably too few people willing to pay for a browser these days.
What is the relationship between W3C and WHATWG these days? I haven't been following that story for years now -- at the time it seemed that W3C was losing relevance, and that WHATWG was becoming the de facto standards keeper for web tech.
There's a very interesting long-form (somewhat chronologically organized) answer to your question from the horse's mouth here https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/W3C
>What is the relationship between W3C and WHATWG these days?
IIRC a few years ago W3C essentially handed over web standards to WHATWG, with the thinking being that it wasn't helpful to have 2 competing standards.
W3C had released redacted snapshots (HTML 5, 5.1, and 5.2) of WHATWG's so-called "living standard", then published HTML 5.3 as a reference to a specific WHATWG commit and for a short time promised more supposedly at least qa'd snapshots, then last year finally gave up and just linked to WHATWG's head [1]. SVG2 didn't go anywhere either due to lack of interest of "browser vendors". MathML hasn't been updated in many years AFAIK. So that leaves ARIA and CSS.
Whatever W3C does and with due respect to TBL, as a self-proclaimed standardization body they've failed spectacularly to keep "browsers vendors" at bay and the web from being monopolized, and I think they should disband, if only to demonstrate to the world that the web isn't "standardized" in any meaningful sense of that word. Even HNers frequently have illusions about "web standards".
While on the way out, they might attempt to deliver CSS specs actually useful for developing browsers. Or maybe they want to venture into developing a browser themselves using their funds?
This is going to come off as glib but the W3C has no relevance anymore, it exists to give the WHATWG the stamp of approval on it's RFCs. It's like the grandfather you give deference to but hasn't been relevant in years.
They may still "control" css and xml (not sure the exhaustive list) but I don't understand why those haven't been moved to WHATWG as well.
The web architecture made it trivial to manipulate information and cancel people. Nothing in the protocols deals with archiving or true redundancy. Nothing deals with DDoS or bypassing censorship. The architecture itself encourages centralization. Moreover, the protocols are currently being manipulated to encourage even more central control.
We're way past the point where expressing sentiments like "this is for everyone" is aspirational. Right now it's merely out of touch and tone-deaf.
Are you complaining that there is no way to "bypass censorship" on Facebook? Because it is pretty trivial to host your own site. The web has absolutely delivered on that promise; just see how the efforts to shut down The Pirate Bay have failed.
Yeah what you are running into is the difference between the web, which is already dead and rotting, versus the internet, which is quite resilient and is in the process of eating the web.
Back in the early days, people used to say "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". That may have even been true back then. Definitely not true any more, at least not of the internet as we know it.
It's still true, for the internet at least; the problem is that the other layers we've since built on top of the internet (large, centralized web services) do not share that virtue.
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The actual argument is that the W3C has absolutely zero teeth because they couldn’t stop EME even if they wanted to and therefore are irrelevant compared to WHATWG.
The spec contains diagrams and descriptions that have been acknowledged by its authors to be factually incorrect. EME pretends to be an in-browser thing, rather than hardware+kernel "hard" DRM. The spec proponents stated that they'll never use the scheme in the spec, and the "hard" DRM is the key feature they're after.
There have been a lot of process shenanigans: e.g. during likely the biggest disagreement in the history of W3C, the chair of the HTML WG announced that there is a consensus in the group about EME, and it can proceed further. Then the EME part has been moved out of public HTML WG to a closed-doors group.
So it wasn't merely Google+Netflix saying "we'll do it anyway". It was a subversion and corruption of the W3C itself.
How are you supporting them?
Let's begin with a polite thank you for your service, a hot drink, maybe some type of certificate of acknowledgment that says like "you were present." and then call it day.
But beyond that, in my opinion, W3C has been a disaster since day 1. It seems like some people with good intentions decided one day they could just play RFC roulette and maybe if they slipped enough nonsense into their content that nobody would notice, and we would just all play along and build the misshapen web they were imagining.
Have you ever looked at your genome? It’s jammed full of old stuff tucked away in case it turns out to be useful someday.
Maybe if they had met us halfway and actually shown us the web they were imagining somewhere somehow it might have been easier to get on board, but whenever I tried to look at any of their standards, it was just endless detail with no explanation of why anybody would want to do any of this.
The "Web" is what Google decides it to be - what new APIs to add to Chrome, what protocols to use (HTTP/2, HTTP/3) to access it.
Large players come and go. Chrome is at the head now because MS rested on their laurels and IE's performance rotted enough for a new player to take them on in market-share.
Edge (Legacy) was a decent browser, but keeping up even with still missing Web APIs proved too expensive (alongside fixing bugs). Safari may be in the same pickle these days with apparently a sizeable backlog of missing features and incompatible implementations. Granted, that may also be due to many developers assuming Chrome to be a reference implementation.
If a new player comes along I'd guess it will be based on Blink, but they would probably need more resources than Google can throw at Chrome. And a way to finance them ... there's probably too few people willing to pay for a browser these days.
IIRC a few years ago W3C essentially handed over web standards to WHATWG, with the thinking being that it wasn't helpful to have 2 competing standards.
Whatever W3C does and with due respect to TBL, as a self-proclaimed standardization body they've failed spectacularly to keep "browsers vendors" at bay and the web from being monopolized, and I think they should disband, if only to demonstrate to the world that the web isn't "standardized" in any meaningful sense of that word. Even HNers frequently have illusions about "web standards".
While on the way out, they might attempt to deliver CSS specs actually useful for developing browsers. Or maybe they want to venture into developing a browser themselves using their funds?
[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/2021/NOTE-html53-20210128/
They may still "control" css and xml (not sure the exhaustive list) but I don't understand why those haven't been moved to WHATWG as well.
Including all the censorship enabled.
Dead Comment
The web architecture made it trivial to manipulate information and cancel people. Nothing in the protocols deals with archiving or true redundancy. Nothing deals with DDoS or bypassing censorship. The architecture itself encourages centralization. Moreover, the protocols are currently being manipulated to encourage even more central control.
We're way past the point where expressing sentiments like "this is for everyone" is aspirational. Right now it's merely out of touch and tone-deaf.
Back in the early days, people used to say "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". That may have even been true back then. Definitely not true any more, at least not of the internet as we know it.