[HN Gopher] W3C re-launched as a public-interest non-profit orga...
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W3C re-launched as a public-interest non-profit organization
Author : epilys
Score : 293 points
Date : 2023-01-31 14:35 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.w3.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.w3.org)
| yreg wrote:
| So what was it before and what's the material difference now?
| shortformblog wrote:
| It was a "hosted" organization that was managed by a number of
| universities and research/educational bodies, which meant that
| it had to go through these organizations to make material
| decisions, such as hiring and investment. They did it this way
| because when the W3C was founded the goal was getting up and
| running quickly. But over time, this setup became complex.
|
| Now, with this restructuring, it can make its own decisions
| about who to hire, for example, and can also do its own
| fundraising.
| gsnedders wrote:
| It was an organisation with no legal existence, existing as an
| agreement between different host organisations (originally MIT
| & CERN, soon turning into MIT & INRIA, then later joined by
| Keio University and Beihang University, INRIA also getting
| replaced by ERCIM).
| mmastrac wrote:
| What I'm learning from this thread today is that there's a lot of
| animosity to what WHATWG did when Hixie et al rebooted the
| standard (which at the time was effectively dying and
| unmaintained).
|
| Can anyone explain this politicking and bad blood? Are there some
| people upset this long after it all happened?
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| My read:
|
| A) WHATWG is totally controlled by the browser vendors, which
| have become even more of a small oligopoly than it seemed they
| would be 10 years ago. It's basically Apple, Mozilla, Google
| and Microsoft -- so those four organizations, three of which
| are enormous corporations, are controlling web standards. (And
| in practice it seems to mostly just be Google-controlled for
| whatever reason, but either way). Whereas W3C at least
| hypothetically was accountable to multiple stakeholders.
|
| B) The WHATWG "living standard" is not really a standard at all
| as many engineers understand or would like it.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > B) The WHATWG "living standard" is not really a standard at
| all as many engineers understand or would like it.
|
| I've found it _incredibly useful_. For the first time,
| someone actually _wrote down_ all the details of how to do
| real-world HTML parsing, rather than having that knowledge
| all embedded in web browsers.
|
| WHATWG specifies how HTML _actually works_. You can follow
| the WHATWG standard and actually implement a web browser, or
| an HTML parser.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| > WHATWG specifies how HTML actually works. You can follow
| the WHATWG standard and actually implement a web browser,
| or an HTML parser.
|
| No they didn't. In fact there are whole sections of the web
| standards that have no normative details on how to
| implement them other than descriptive notes about how the
| end results should function. It's a core reason why the
| Internet Explorer team had issues with CSS composition.
| It's UNDEFINED.
|
| Not sure what "standard" you're reading. No implementor
| wants to write against a "living standard" that you have to
| fork for a pinned date of what your rasterizer conforms to.
|
| WHATWG just links to a bunch of W3C actual versioned
| standards for the majority of specifications, most of which
| they didn't actually want to do work on.
|
| Maybe HTML parsing is one of them, but HTML parsing
| mechanics are perhaps the least interesting of all of the
| specifications.
|
| Oh by the way, for people who actually read the
| specifications required to build a full web browser know
| that you still actually have to read WebKit, Chromium, and
| Gecko/Quantum codebases to understand what they have all
| silently agreed to do that isn't documented in the
| specifications.
|
| Why? Because further still, there are whole sections of web
| standards that are intentionally undefined and left to
| vendors to implement however they want.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > It's a core reason why the Internet Explorer team had
| issues with CSS composition
|
| I may be _entirely_ mistaken, but isn 't that just
| because WHATWG hasn't forked CSS away from W3C? Perhaps
| this is an indication that they should?
|
| > Maybe HTML parsing is one of them, but HTML parsing
| mechanics are perhaps the least interesting of all of the
| specifications.
|
| They're something that was previously (as far as I know)
| completely undocumented, for which there's now a publicly
| documented algorithm that actually parses real web
| content. I think that's a good approach to provide for
| more things, and there are still plenty of things for
| which we don't have enough information like that.
|
| > Because further still, there are whole sections of web
| standards that are intentionally undefined and left to
| vendors to implement however they want.
|
| Other than the _utter garbage fire_ that is DRM, what
| other aspects are "intentionally undefined"? (Genuine
| question, would love to learn this, and would be
| unpleasantly surprised to find out that there are more.)
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| The most important ones..., like, how is a website drawn?
| Well, there's intentionally no such definition. And
| people wonder why Internet Explorer was so "bad," it
| wasn't that IE was bad, the standards themselves are
| garbage. Foundational visual user agent compositing is
| based today on CSS 2.1, and all CSS modules that build on
| top of it.
|
| Newer algorithms like flexbox have a formal algorithm
| with minor undefined details documented.
|
| The entire box model has no normative processing
| standard. It basically tells implementors, "Well, it
| should look like this, but you know if you want to do
| something different, that's fine. We don't tell you how
| to process glyphs or lines, so figure it out."
|
| Let me put it this way: there is no such thing as a
| collection of web standards that you can read today and
| implement a visually similar output to mainstream
| evergreen browsers. They don't exist. It's a farce, a
| lie, an illusion. However, you want to articulate it,
| there it is.
|
| Some subsets are formally defined and provide an actual
| algorithm you can implement, others describe an output
| with no processing model, further some standards exist
| which implicitly require that an undefined formal
| processing model exists.
|
| You MUST read existing web browser codebases and their
| explicit comments which specifically say things like,
| "This is what WebKit/Blink/Gecko/Quantum does, so we do
| it here, too," in order to create a web browser that does
| something similar.
|
| It can be as basic as line processing to as nuanced as
| box shadow processing, or as complex as how subtrees
| affect _framebuffers._ Yes, there are CSS properties
| dedicated to altering the implementation level details of
| a CSS processing model that doesn 't formally exist.
|
| I know this specifically because I wrote a compositor
| that conforms to a subset of CSS 2.1 and additional CSS
| Modules.
|
| I STILL don't know how one writes a performant compositor
| today because what you're supposed to do is write one
| with a tile-based rasterizer and virtualized graphics
| commands.
|
| You can't just rasterize subtrees to framebuffers because
| the calculated CSS may result in dimensions larger than
| what your hardware can support for backing layers.
|
| Try finding that in the CSS standards.
| rhdunn wrote:
| The key issue is the "Living Standard" part, not the
| technical details of the specification.
|
| Practically, it means that an implementor needs to record
| the date at which they implemented a given piece of
| functionality.
|
| It means that: 1. different implementors (e.g. the various
| HTML parsers in Java, C#, etc.) can be on different
| revisions, so can have subtly different behaviour while
| being conformant to those versions of the spec; 2. an
| implementor that implements a given algorithm/behaviour in
| the spec can have the details of that change -- therefore,
| they need to follow all commits to the spec in order to
| figure out what has changed; 3. references to the spec
| (numbered headings -- e.g. "5. parsing", and URIs) can
| change when content gets moved, merged, renamed, making
| other specs that reference those easily outdated.
|
| Having numbered specifications makes it easier to tell what
| is in that version and what has changed between the
| versions.
|
| Imagine writing a Java, C#, etc. application to a Living
| Standard. It would quickly become unmanageable as libraries
| would be using different features from different revisions.
| IshKebab wrote:
| If you've done any web work at all though it's pretty
| obvious that the edges of the spec are never especially
| well specified and browsers have different
| implementations all the time. Sometimes deliberately.
|
| So you don't really lose anything at all by having a
| continuously updated spec instead of a versioned spec.
| Hell if you want you can think of the date as the
| version. Then there's no difference at all. Many
| versioning systems work like that.
|
| > Imagine writing a Java, C# etc. application to a Living
| Standard.
|
| Those are bad examples because they have implementations
| that are overwhelmingly popular and therefore the de
| facto standard is "what does the official compiler do?".
|
| A better example is C++. Guess what? C++ implementations
| are incomplete and patchy and often have subtle
| differences just like with web browsers.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I personally think the web _should_ have used a more
| solid standard from day 1. If something like strictly
| validated XHTML had been the _very first_ thing shipped
| on the web, and anything that didn 't validate wouldn't
| display, we'd have had a very different web.
|
| But _given_ the web we have, I think we need to document
| it.
|
| > It would quickly become unmanageable as libraries would
| be using different features from different revisions.
|
| As far as I know, HTML5 is generally forward-compatible.
| Once something has actually shipped in the standard,
| there's a question of "how new of a browser do you need
| to use this", but not "how old".
| bawolff wrote:
| The counter to (a) that, is if your standard is beholden to a
| bunch a stakeholders who aren't actually making the software,
| you're going to end up with something useless that nobody
| implements.
|
| The biggest difference between whatwg html and earlier w3c
| html is that people actually implemented whatwg html where
| w3c standards were more wishful thinking that never got used
| or implemented (rip xhtml).
| WorldMaker wrote:
| XHTML 1.x was well implemented in most browsers and was
| highly used by a subset of web developers.
|
| XHTML 1.x also did a lot to help shake out things like
| "quirks mode" versus "standards mode".
|
| HTML 5 imported a lot of things that worked from XHTML 1.x.
|
| It's true that XHTML 2.0 was murdered before the spec
| finished but that was part and parcel of the WHATWG coup.
| We have no idea what the final product from XHTML 2.0 would
| have looked like (it certainly didn't look useless, though
| it aimed for the stars and probably wouldn't have met them)
| or if it had implemented if it would have been used because
| the browser implementors had already decided they were
| going to take charge instead.
| bentley wrote:
| > XHTML 1.x was well implemented in most browsers and was
| highly used by a subset of web developers.
|
| Well, the XML part wasn't. Serve your XHTML as text/html
| and it was "supported" by virtue of being treated like
| HTML with some minor syntax errors. Serve your XHTML as
| application/xhtml+xml, as required to get any XML
| features, and it wouldn't display in Internet Explorer at
| all.
|
| XHTML 1.0 was allowed to be served with text/html for
| compatibility reasons, if you were careful to not make it
| too different from HTML (don't self-close an empty
| <textarea>, for example, and add a space before every
| "/>"). XHTML 1.1 didn't allow the text/html MIME type at
| all, and so basically nobody used it.
|
| That's not even getting into XML's unpopularly draconic
| error handling for pages that _did_ get served as XML...
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I recall I had XHTML 1.x Strict served as XML working in
| Internet Explorer (that would have been my primary
| testing/dev browser at the time, even). It was certainly
| no cakewalk, but it was briefly possible. As I recall it
| the XML mime types stopped working again shortly after
| HTML 5 became the headwind.
| goto11 wrote:
| XHTML 2.0 was not backwards compatible with HTML and was
| therefore doomed from the start. It would never have
| succeeded.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| As I recall even in draft standards you could mix XHTML
| 1.0 namespaces and XHTML 2.0 namespaces to use "backwards
| compatible markup" where you needed to. It wasn't
| _pretty_ as most things involving XML and lots of mixed
| namespaces isn 't, but it was possible.
|
| We still don't know if it would have gotten _more_
| backwards compatible had browsers tried to actually
| implement it.
| bawolff wrote:
| > it certainly didn't look useless, though it aimed for
| the stars and probably wouldn't have met them
|
| That one sentence pretty much sums up why w3c is a bad
| standards body.
|
| A standards body is not a research group. If you are
| aiming for the stars you are doing it wrong. A standards
| body is supposed to be doing the boring work of
| formalizing what is known to work well, not try and
| invent new untested things.
| willseth wrote:
| In order for a standards body to be successful, it must
| be possible to attempt standards and fail them before
| they leave the standards body. Otherwise they would lose
| credibility by publishing recommendations that won't get
| wide acceptance. XHTML2 is an example of a W3C WG
| exercising restraint. That is a good thing.
|
| You seem to think standards should only be built in
| reverse, which is essentially the WHATWG philosophy:
| Browser vendors implement something they think is useful,
| then try to negotiate to get it standardized. That's not
| bad per se, but it's limited and it's a different system
| of accountability.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I think there is a large spectrum of standards bodies and
| working to productize outside research and aspirations is
| a part of some good standards bodies.
|
| Not a lot of people are calling WHATWG a bad standards
| body, but it is even worse at taking stuff directly out
| of Blink research and labeling it a draft standard with
| only a single implementation with sometimes seemingly
| very little study into its safety or long-term viability.
|
| I suppose there is a small distinction between Ivory
| Tower academic aspirations and research versus Walled
| Garden corporate aspirations and research, but at the end
| of the day it certainly feels the same, and I have more
| reasons, myself, to admire the academic aspirations that
| aren't tied to corporate interests and profit motives,
| but I can understand why some feel what Google and WHATWG
| is doing is better for the web because they start with
| that first "implementation" of their research instead of
| a chalkboard and a hope for a better web.
| willseth wrote:
| Great argument for zero accountability to users and
| everyone else impacted by decisions of browser vendors. You
| don't seem to be aware that the W3C has been chugging
| along, publishing real web standards that do get
| implemented, for years - or the actual roles of W3C and
| WHATWG in the standards process - so just stop. (Also FYI
| https://caniuse.com/?search=xhtml)
| bawolff wrote:
| > You don't seem to be aware that the W3C has been
| chugging along, publishing real web standards
|
| Including most recently standards that are basically a
| way to give a thin veneer of respectability to crypto
| shit (e.g. DID)
|
| To be clear, i am not saying everything w3c does is
| totally devoid of value. They have done useful work. But
| its still an org that generally makes bad standards that
| are rarely followed. The recent bitcoin stuff is shit and
| basically not a standard. The historical standards are
| also often terrible, especially when you step away from
| html (you can't possibly read XMLSignature and think any
| of it is a remotely good idea).
|
| As an org, its riding almost entirely on the coat tails
| of HTML, and now that that is gone, what is the point?
|
| > zero accountability to users
|
| Has w3c ever done anything at all that actually helped
| users over browser vendors? Things like P3P that aren't
| implemented don't count.
| willseth wrote:
| [flagged]
| no_wizard wrote:
| Two use Blink, which is a fork of Webkit (Google owned.
| Microsoft uses its own forked version for Microsoft Edge
| since Edge Version 79). Apple uses Webkit proper, and Mozilla
| is Gecko driven.
| rascul wrote:
| I find it interesting that KDE is the original creators of
| the most used browser engine today.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG)
|
| https://whatwg.org/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG
| goto11 wrote:
| WHATWG did the right thing because W3C had basically abandoned
| HTML at the time. A fork of the spec was the only was forward
| for the web. But WHATWG is fully controlled by the browser
| vendors where W3C was more neutral.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| It depends on if you agree that the focus on XHTML as the way
| forward (and out of "quirks mode") for the web was
| "abandoning" HTML or not.
| goto11 wrote:
| Quirks mode is a backwards-compatible rendering mode which
| retains certain historical bugs in the CSS implementation.
| It is completely independent of the HTML/XHTML divide which
| is about the syntax of HTML.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Hammering out how strict XHTML was to be was a big part
| of the browser conception of "modes" to begin with. XHTML
| itself as a standard suggested "three modes"
| Transitional, Strict, and Frameset. Transitional XHTML
| was still more strict than classic "quirks mode" (though
| obviously much less strict than Strict XHTML which was
| too strict for most people) which got its name somewhat
| in contrast. Quirks mode survived for a while longer
| after XHTML declined because of things like historical
| bugs in CSS (and ES3-), but trying to clean up many of
| those historical bugs was considered a part of the reason
| for XHTML and part of why XHTML suggested multiple
| "modes" that documents could opt into to get better
| behavior.
| goto11 wrote:
| The three XHTML DTD's (Transitional, Strict, Frameset)
| were just copied from the HTML 4.0 spec, so they are
| independent of the HTML/XHTML divide.
|
| There are really three independent things in play:
|
| - DTD's define a set of valid elements and attributes.
|
| - Quirks/standards rendering modes affect how CSS is
| rendered.
|
| - The HTML/XHTML divide is about the low-level HTML
| syntax and how invalid syntax should be handled.
|
| These are all independent concerns since CSS operates on
| the parsed tree of elements and doesn't care about
| lexical syntax or DTD's.
|
| XHTML did not attempt to address the quirks/standards
| mode issues at all, since this is the domain of CSS.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| As far as I recall the HTML 4.0 and XHTML 1.0 specs were
| drafted side by side and which one you want to give
| credit for introducing the different DTD "modes" is a
| matter of perspective. My perspective from that time was
| that because the "modes" affected XHTML parsing (and mime
| types) so much more than they affected HTML 4 they always
| seemed to me designed for XHTML and back-ported/side-
| ported to HTML 4.
|
| The DTDs were a signal designed to opt into different
| parsing _and_ rendering modes, including CSS rendering
| differences (and as I recall even differences in ES3 mode
| "option strict"/proto-ES5; though memory is hazy and I
| don't remember which browser I think did that in my
| testing at the time) and DTDs were a simpler signal than
| most of the other alternatives at the time and since
| (META tags/Headers). They were never independent concerns
| in practice, though sure they could have been in theory.
| Rendering changes _were_ one of the reasons few
| developers opted into XHTML 1.x Strict.
| gsnedders wrote:
| The very short tl;dr is there were a couple main contentions:
|
| * Continuing work on HTML at all, instead of furthering work on
| XHTML + XForms + etc.
|
| * Certain decisions, especially around accessibility &
| internationalisation, at a point where the editor (then Hixie)
| practically controlled the decision making.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| They could have done it as a WG in W3C, but they decided not
| to. They instead created a separate organization and cabal
| which today is controlled de facto by Google.
| gsnedders wrote:
| They couldn't: to form a W3C WG requires support of the staff
| and the W3C membership, and it was clear that there wasn't
| that support prior to the WHATWG's formation. I believe the
| original preference of those involved was to do it at the
| W3C.
|
| And indeed, Web Forms 2.0 was presented as a position paper
| by Opera and Mozilla at a W3C workshop in 2004, prior to the
| formation of the WHATWG, and voted down:
| https://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/papers/opera.html
| echelon wrote:
| They killed momentum on XHTML, which included reusable
| modularization and components. Inclusion of semantic web /
| structured RDF graph data was an objective, and this all got
| pushed by the wayside.
|
| Strict, structured data could have posed a threat to Google by
| enabling other search engines to more easily build fact-based
| competitors and crawl the web of rich data. The decentralized
| nature of OWL/RDF would have pushed the web closer to P2P
| aggregation (think RSS, FOAF, pingback...)
|
| The web could have been less Facebook-y, less Google-y, more
| Napster, more GPT-3 if XHTML had won.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| What killed XHTML was the lack of backwards compatibility and
| especially the first-mover problem with embedding and the ads
| ecosystem. Namely, making a large production website fully
| validate was very hard, yielded zero ROI, and if anything
| went even slightly wrong such that invalid XML was emitted
| that would create a site outage that you couldn't easily
| detect server side.
|
| That's a bitter pill to swallow even as is, but now throw in
| the common practice of mixing in markup from third parties
| for ads, social buttons, login forms and other things and now
| you can have a major site outage caused at random by third
| parties, which, again, cannot be detected server side.
|
| As for RDF, GPT-3 is sort of the ultimate repudiation to that
| whole line of AI research. GPT-3 doesn't care about
| structured data at all, it can't even use it any better than
| a human would.
| bawolff wrote:
| The RDF vision (where every website authors their own rdf
| graph in an open world sort of way, which web spiders search
| in a unified fashion) has tons of problems that its advocates
| refuse to acknowledge. Most notably lack of incentives to
| participate, complex authoring burden and poor scalability of
| graph querying.
|
| The only time rdf has had success is when there is only an
| extremely limited vocabulary allowed (xmp, certain other
| metadata standards) or when the ecosystem is closed so its
| just one site or group making the rdf (e.g. wikidata)
|
| It was never a threat to google because it was never going to
| win.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| That last assertion is heavy speculation. Why are we assuming
| that, had XHTML been the dominant infrastructure, Facebook
| and Google wouldn't still be the best at leveraging it?
|
| And if anything, Google desperately did and does want people
| to semantically annotate data. They're extremely confident in
| their ability to be the best at organizing it, and well-
| annotated clean data is a huge benefit to them.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Disagree. HTML, until HTML 4.01 published 1999, was
| formulated as an SGML vocabulary. Then, starting in 1997, W3C
| (technically, the SGML Extended Review Board in cooperation
| with ISO) "went meta" and created XML as an SGML subset in
| anticipation of a wealth of new vocabularies on browsers to
| be supported, of which SVG and MathML made it. Today, these
| vocabularies are integrated into HTML, with HTML rather than
| XML parsing rules (for example, element names are treated
| case-insensitive). HTML itself still uses tag inference and
| attribute shortforms that are only part of SGML but not the
| XML subset of SGML. Basically, the multi-year detour of
| creating XML was not worth it _for the web_ since everything
| XML could do was by definition possible using SGML as well,
| it being a strict superset of XML, despite XML being hugely
| successful in enterprise computing and the publishing
| industry, and most HNers only knowing XML.
|
| What XML (XHTML2) was onto, however, was a completely
| unrealistic attempt to redefine browser behavior and
| vocabulary, with no buy-in from browser vendors (except
| Opera?), and with things such as XForms and wildly unproven
| RDF/SPARQL stuff. Ian Hickson was right in 2004 to fork HTML;
| browser vendors had no alternative.
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| Did the people driving the semantic web ever really get
| traction on the taxonomy problem? I vaguely remember a lot of
| hand-waving about semantic ontologies, but the mechanics to
| actual reconcile the widely divergent labels humans
| inevitably produce always seemed to be someone else's
| problem.
| goto11 wrote:
| RDF is independent of (X)HTML and W3C kept control of RDF and
| related standards.
|
| It is true that RDF have failed to live up to its promise,
| but this have nothing to do with WHATWG.
| pwdisswordfishc wrote:
| I can't speak for everyone else, but I am resentful that it
| promoted the Web as an platform for running applications
| containing arbitrarily-complex (Turing-complete) code instead
| of a platform for exchanging structured (declarative)
| documents, I despise the philosophy of 'backwards compatibility
| at all costs' it follows, and the massive volume of standards
| documents it produces, all of which basically guaranteed the
| browser engine (quasi-)market would remain an oligopoly, by
| making it prohibitively expensive for new, leaner yet practical
| implementations to emerge (both because of the initial cost of
| catching up with the _current_ state of the art and also of
| keeping up with the Red Queen's Race of the ever-evolving
| 'living standards'; just look at the sorry state of NetSurf).
| Not to mention the security holes their attitude engendered. If
| we moved to XHTML, maybe we wouldn't have the meta-utopia Web
| 2.0 promised, but at least we wouldn't have CVE-2020-26870.
|
| The WHATWG was formed as a cartel of browser vendors that
| pretended to be a standards body. And these days even 'cartel'
| may be too generous, now it's just a Chrome rubber-stamping
| committee.
| sylware wrote:
| Well, it is supposed to be fine since the web core is still
| around which nearly all services provided over the net can be
| performed with, namely with noscript/basic (x)html. You can add
| <audio> and <video> and pass that to an external mediaplayer
| until the URL seeking interface is standard and keep web browsers
| as they are supposed to be: lean/light client.
|
| Basic (x)html forms can do wonders.
| rvz wrote:
| So can they now tell us who voted for the DRM changes and why
| Mozilla failed to resign with the EFF despite going with those
| changes?
|
| This announcement is a magnificent _nothing_.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Too bad WHATWG has hijacked the standards.
| anticensor wrote:
| Apparently the name WHATWG is also self-descriptive, as in
| "What working group?".
| dmitriid wrote:
| It's _good_ that WHATWG hijacked the HTML standard and made it
| consistent among browsers etc.
|
| Too bad _Chrome_ has now hijacked _all_ of web-related
| standards.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Not all too different to back when Microsoft hijacked all
| web-related standards.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Who do you think runs the WHATWG?
| dmitriid wrote:
| "The WHATWG was founded by individuals from Apple Inc., the
| Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software"
|
| Steering group is people from the 4 major companies.
|
| At least originally WHATWG was undeniably and undisputedly
| a good thing. Their work literally removed
| incompatibilities from the web by producing standards that
| specify how HTML should actually be rendered, for example.
|
| Now everything is subverted and co-opted by Google, of
| course.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| > Their work literally removed incompatibilities from the
| web by producing standards that specify how HTML should
| actually be rendered, for example.
|
| No they didn't. There's no standard today that exists
| that describes the implementation level details of CSS
| 2.1. It's descriptive and you have to figure it out
| yourself. // 2.3 The CSS 2.1 processing
| model // This section up to but not
| including its subsections is non-normative.
| // This section presents one possible model of how
| user agents that // support CSS work. This is
| only a conceptual model; real implementations //
| may vary.
| orangepurple wrote:
| I thought W3C became irrelevant with the advent of WHATWG.
|
| In any case, the de-facto standard is whatever Blink does, and
| there is really no way around that for the foreseeable future.
| KwanEsq wrote:
| WHATWG only picked up the abandoned HTML torch when W3C went
| off into fantasy land with XHTML 2.0. W3C was still and always
| relevant for CSS.
| orangepurple wrote:
| How can W3C be relevant if Google develops the roadmap for
| Blink?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| XHTML 2.0 had some good ideas, it wasn't all "fantasy land",
| and WHATWG still picked over the corpse of XHTML 2.0 and
| added some of them to HTML 5. XHTML 2.0 was never truly
| finished so we have no idea what the final product would have
| looked like if the browser implementors had actually
| contributed back into the process instead of going off in
| their own direction.
| btown wrote:
| So, going off some of the descriptions of how this impacts
| budgeting and hiring from [0], I feel like this is a bit of a
| double edged sword:
|
| - Under the new model, corporations will be able to more
| aggressively influence funding, and thus be better able to ensure
| their interests are represented by new staff members responsible
| for shaping debate on features.
|
| - But under W3C's old model, where budgets and hiring were
| subject to approval by university liasons, staff couldn't be
| hired with enough agility and bandwidth to prevent those
| corporations from being overly aggressive anyways. Perhaps with
| more non-corporate-aligned humans being able to wholly focus on
| standardization now, there will be more attention paid to
| community engagement.
|
| I suppose time will tell. When it comes to things like FLoC (now
| Topics) [1] the privacy implications of having an agile standards
| board are more important than ever, and may actually have
| significant impacts on people's physical safety.
|
| [0] https://associationsnow.com/2022/08/world-wide-web-
| consortiu...
|
| [1] https://blog.google/products/chrome/get-know-new-topics-
| api-...
| phpisthebest wrote:
| They have been a rubber stamp for Google for years now anyway
| so there is no functional difference.
|
| What ever Google wants, the W3C approves as "standard"
| asoneth wrote:
| Agreed, though I'm not sure the W3C has much choice. When
| WHATWG wrested control of HTML from W3C it drove home that
| browser implementers determine the standard. Given chromium's
| ~75% market share[1] and Apple's ~18% market share it
| increasingly seems like the purpose of the W3C is
| performative, to lend more credibility to what has become a
| proprietary standard driven by Google and Apple.
|
| [1] tallying across chromium-based browsers:
| https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
| share#monthly-2022...
| dmitriid wrote:
| It's not true, to w3c's surprising credit.
|
| What Google does, is publish a "draft" which is as far from a
| standard as their authors are from the Moon. This gives
| Chrome the leeway to call it an "emerging standard" and just
| ship it. It doesn't care if there are objections, or that
| other browser vendors will not implement it. It's now a
| "standard" in Google's dictionary.
|
| For something to become a W3C standard even in the present
| world, you need a consensus and at least two independent
| implementations. None of that exists for stuff Google pushes
| out (hardware APIs, web transport, constructible stylesheets
| [1], the list goes on...).
|
| The correct name for those is _Chrome-only non-standards_.
|
| [1] These one isn't even a draft. It is.... "a collection of
| interesting ideas" in a working group
| https://wicg.github.io/construct-stylesheets/ Shipped by
| default in Chrome, of course
| jacooper wrote:
| Chromium only, not chrome only
| afavour wrote:
| That's pretty transparently untrue. Plenty of examples of
| Mozilla and/or Apple refusing to give the go-ahead.
| btown wrote:
| Whether or not this has been true historically, all three
| companies are under massively increased pressure in the
| current environment, and may not be sufficient checks on
| each other the way they have been in the past.
| gsnedders wrote:
| Genuinely: what do you believe the W3C has published as a
| standard (and not as a draft, not as a community group
| report) without support from multiple vendors?
| atomicUpdate wrote:
| > When it comes to things like FLoC (now Topics) [1] the
| privacy implications of having an agile standards board are
| more important than ever, and may actually have significant
| impacts on people's physical safety.
|
| This sounds like needless fear-mongering. Is there anything to
| backup any concerns about people's physical safety?
| darig wrote:
| [dead]
| greggarious wrote:
| Remember the good old days, when Google didn't have a browser
| and Googlers donated generously to public benefit nonprofits
| like Mozilla?
|
| The real issue is allowing folks with a fat salary to advocate
| in bad faith against a healthy internet. (Along with shit like
| moving the Chrome team into the same building as Mozilla HQ and
| poaching employees for years.)
| rascul wrote:
| Isn't Google still donating generously to Mozilla?
| greggarious wrote:
| Individual Googlers might be, "Google", the company, is
| relentlessly ratfucking the organization as it perpetually
| threatens to yank the search deal.
| gsnedders wrote:
| It was frequently the case the hosts didn't want to be sinking
| money into the W3C previously: this is the reason for many of
| the recent (controversial) moves (especially around WoT,
| advertising, etc.) to try and attract further members to try
| and increase revenue.
|
| If anything, this is likely going to result in the W3C having
| fewer staff and lower costs, and thus only needing membership
| fees to cover a lower sum than it has previously.
| asasidh wrote:
| A truly decentralized web should not have any central bodies,
| non-profit or otherwise.
| mnot wrote:
| So, how would that work, exactly?
| shortformblog wrote:
| For those interested in this from a nonprofit perspective, I did
| an interview with W3C's recently departed CEO, Jeff Jaffe, last
| year to discuss the organization's thinking around this move:
| https://associationsnow.com/2022/08/world-wide-web-consortiu...
|
| (Jaffe left the organization in December:
| https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/9776)
| brickers wrote:
| Jeff... Jaffe?
| [deleted]
| zoobab wrote:
| They were financed by corporations.
|
| They gave up freedom by voting for secret DRMs in "standards".
|
| A complete disgrace.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| The other option was irrelevance. At least we have a seat at
| the table.
| mmastrac wrote:
| The other option was forcing browsers to have to make this
| part of the tech stack convoluted and painful for those using
| DRM, perhaps diminishing the appeal of using it -- not
| irrelevance. We had plugins in the early days of the web, and
| the W3C was entirely relevant at that time despite the
| dominance of flash.
| zokier wrote:
| > The other option was forcing browsers to have to make
| this part of the tech stack convoluted and painful for
| those using DRM,
|
| W3c had and has zero leverage to _force_ browsers to do
| anything
| spankalee wrote:
| You'd rather have plugins than streaming services that just
| work?
|
| Please tell me that since you're against DRM you don't use
| Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, or
| any of the other services that have exploded since EME.
|
| And since they're presumably wrong to want DRM, tell me you
| also don't pirate their content.
| mmastrac wrote:
| > You'd rather have plugins than streaming services that
| just work?
|
| Yes.
|
| > Please tell me that since you're against DRM you don't
| use Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple
| TV, or any of the other services that have exploded since
| EME.
|
| No, I'm still a happy Netflix subscriber. And they would
| have done just fine in a plugin model.
|
| > And since they're presumably wrong to want DRM, tell me
| you also don't pirate their content.
|
| Your logic is just so bizarre here I won't bother with a
| response.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > No, I'm still a happy Netflix subscriber. And they
| would have done just fine in a plugin model.
|
| Wouldn't that include disadvantages for the users?
| Plugins are usually a black box, working independent and
| lacking any way for customizing. The solution now is
| narrow enough that customization is possible for users on
| the harmless parts, without touching the DRM-part. By
| which I mean things like play-settings, the interface,
| behavior. There are many different types of extensions
| for changing the user experience on Netflix and such,
| stuff which did not exist for Flash&Co.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I spent years authoring plugins.
|
| Anybody who cares about end-use security should want
| plugins out as quickly and completely as possible.
|
| They literally ran in the same process as the browser.
| Full access to the memory itself. No security at all, and
| many of them were closed source.
|
| The DRM standard was a strict improvement over the status
| quo.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| EME only works with proprietary plugins anyway. A <video>
| tag with EME is functionally indistinguishable from a
| fully proprietary <embed>. But the W3C decided to endorse
| EME as the "open" solution for completely spurious
| reasons.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 8.1 CDM constraints in the EME is a pretty big deal
| relative to the plugin standard that hooks the <embed>
| tag. Plugins generally ran unsandboxed in the browsers'
| memory and therefore were a massive security hole.
|
| EME unblocked killing Flash and made the web more secure.
| mmastrac wrote:
| > EME unblocked killing Flash and made the web more
| secure.
|
| Neither of these are correct. Flash was dead on mobile
| long before EME, and the code running behind EMEs is an
| unaudited, black box (and having worked on decompiling
| the Mediatek secure enclave code, it's absolutely
| horrendous).
|
| The only thing I'd consider to be marginally secure is
| Firefox's sandboxed DRM provider, and that could easily
| be a vendored extension on the window/media object.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > the code running behind EMEs is an unaudited, black box
|
| It's an unaudited black box that isn't running in the
| same process as the browser itself. It can certainly do
| risky things in that context, but one of those things
| isn't "scrape the user's bank password directly out of
| the RAM it's sharing with the tab showing the bank's web
| site."
| mmastrac wrote:
| I'm not going to defend plugins as they were (a plugin-
| based DRM solution would not necessarily rely on the
| <embed> tags), but they were migrating to run in
| sandboxes before flash died. Chrome shipped flash-as-
| locked-down-process from early in its history.
|
| EME code, however, can have deep hooks into the OS,
| especially on mobile.
| account42 wrote:
| > You'd rather have plugins than streaming services that
| just work?
|
| Yes.
|
| > Please tell me that since you're against DRM you don't
| use Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple
| TV, or any of the other services that have exploded since
| EME.
|
| I don't.
|
| > And since they're presumably wrong to want DRM, tell me
| you also don't pirate their content.
|
| Not since I got out of school. But it's also irrelevant
| as file sharing is not overly affected by DRM since it
| only needs to be stripped once.
| blendergeek wrote:
| > Please tell me that since you're against DRM you don't
| use Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple
| TV, or any of the other services that have exploded since
| EME.
|
| I can oppose DRM and still (regretfully) use DRM'd
| streaming services. DRM was not necessary for any of
| those services. Piracy still exists despite DRM. DRM is
| about controlling the end-user experience, not preventing
| piracy.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| I dont consume any of them in a Web Browser.
|
| I watch them from a Roku Device on an Actual TV, where TV
| and Movies should be consumed, not in a web browser
| mattl wrote:
| I'd much rather have plugins. I don't want to watch any
| of the services you mentioned on my computer. I have a
| dedicated hardware device for watching these things,
| attached to my TV.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Plugins are a massive security hole.
| mattl wrote:
| Make a native app for Windows and Mac or something
| then... keep that stuff out of the browser.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Why? The browser is a far more convenient deployment
| solution for the end-user: high-security via sandboxes
| and partitioning by default, temporary, no installation
| step required.
|
| Are we pro-web here? Because if the answer to hard
| problems is "make it native then," we might as well
| declare the HTML stack a dead-end technology.
| mattl wrote:
| I'm pro-web. I'm also pro-watching TV things on a TV.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I don't own a TV and I don't know what a "TV thing" is.
|
| I do have a pretty large monitor on a wall patched into a
| desktop PC via HDMI though.
| mattl wrote:
| If I want to watch Netflix, etc I watch them on a TV with
| a dedicated remote. I'm not watching those things on a
| desktop computer attached to a big screen.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It was a masterstroke how Macromedia managed to normalize
| cross-platform video with Flash.
|
| Circa 2000 you had a number of vendors pushing incompatible
| video and audio plugins such as Apple, RealMedia,
| Microsoft, etc.
|
| If you wanted to publish media and have it work for
| everyone you had to support at least three formats.
|
| Everybody thought Flash was about games and vector
| animation and there was no pushback when Macromedia had
| gotten a working video player into almost all web browsers,
| which made YouTube possible. Oddly Adobe bought Macromedia
| at that time and it was downhill for Flash after that... I
| think primarily because web browser vendors quit fighting
| over video formats and ganged up against Flash. Had
| Microsoft, Apple, and others really known Flash was going
| to win the video war they might not have bundled it with
| their browsers.
|
| Ultimately HTML 5 killed off Actionscript and today Adobe
| Animate is alive and well not because people output Flash
| or even Flash-emulated-in-HTML 5 but because people output
| cross-platform video with it.
| mattl wrote:
| Flash also had a terrible security history and was seen
| as a battery killer on mobile.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Besides the notorious security issues, flash had abysmal
| accessibility, cross platform support was nominal at best
| if you weren't on windows, and despite this it was being
| used in all sorts of places where it was completely
| unnecessary, like what seemed to be nearly every
| restaurant website. There were websites with navigation
| menus written in flash for no good reason at all, just
| because whoever made the website thought it would be cool
| to use more animations or something.
|
| The whole thing was a disaster. Nominally cross-platform
| video playback was hardly a consolation.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I remember getting involved in an argument with somebody
| over this back when it was called 'FutureSplash' and
| before it was bought by Macromedia. This guy was a
| political activist and we were working with him to put
| Noam Chomsky lectures online long before there were
| podcasts but he thought people would connect better w/
| animation-heavy interfaces.
|
| I thought it was a good case study in how somebody who is
| worried about corporate power when it affects the
| workplace or foreign policy can be indifferent to
| corporate power over technology. My friend Harel and I
| felt pretty firmly that a web based on open standards was
| going to be good for 'ordinary people' having venues for
| self-expression. I think Mike Albert's viewpoint is
| closer to the mainstream though, where most people
| perceive ease-of-use as more 'liberating' than personal
| control, like that _1984_ ad by Apple.
|
| Today I think it is funny because I like animation-heavy
| interfaces in video games and think, hypothetically, it
| would be nice to see some more of that on the web, but I
| develop a lot of 'intranet' applications that
| consistently avoid the SPA boondoggle where the one thing
| I really can't do is animate transitions. I guess I could
| use HTMX and push the animations out to a 'frame' around
| the 'pages' that get loaded but that is unappealing to me
| because I'd like to have completely integrated animations
| and not a library of dissolves, fades, wipes and loading
| indicators that are much less necessary if you are
| loading a 25k 'screen' as opposed to 2.5 MB of
| Javascript.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >The other option was forcing browsers
|
| How, exactly?
| ekianjo wrote:
| Pretty much like the FDA
| uni_rule wrote:
| The FDA is a executive agency under the US federal
| government. Also how does food have secret DRM?
| afavour wrote:
| To me it shows that they are living in the real world. Had they
| denied DRM in browsers we'd have everything behind native app
| barriers. I don't see that as a positive.
| zoobab wrote:
| And no need of HTML anymore, all the websites looks like
| <html><one.js><two.js><three.js>, nowadays.
| robertoandred wrote:
| What do you think that JS generates?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Not my websites they don't
| Spivak wrote:
| No no no silly. <html> ...
| <body> <div id="app"> </div>
| <script type="module" async src="/app.js"></script>
| </body> </html>
| college_physics wrote:
| As important as the Web still is (and with the re-
| decentralization of the fediverse [0] it may yet get granted a
| second chance), it has been clear for some time now that the
| shape of digital life is rapidly being defined by mobile devices
| where the web is a second class citizen. The original "web-phone"
| dream has failed [1] and there is a distinct lack of ambition
| about "open mobile".
|
| [0] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
|
| [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox-
| os/basic-...
| danielEM wrote:
| Paid seats kill the purpose. These standards are only for rich
| companies to preserve their business.
| debacle wrote:
| Is the W3C legitimate? At this point most of their standards are
| behind the curve. It feels as though the big three are setting
| the standards, and others (including W3C) are just following
| along.
| not2b wrote:
| That's how standards organizations usually work. They can't
| dictate standards. They have more power when there are many
| participants, but when there are only a few players all they
| can do is formalize things big players (mainly Chrome) decided
| to add.
| debacle wrote:
| That's how fake standards organizations work. Industries with
| real standards bodies benefit from collaboration on standards
| before implementation.
| neilv wrote:
| This could turn out to be a very positive development.
|
| The press release has more info:
| https://www.w3.org/2023/01/pressrelease-w3c-le-launched.html...
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _Our vision for the future is a web that is truly a force for
| good ... truly international ... more inclusive ... more
| respectful of its users ... supports truth better than falsehood,
| people more than profits, humanity rather than hate ... that
| works for everyone, because of everyone._
|
| Ok the question is _how_ to achieve these goals and are those
| having failed to deliver on these goals for 28 years now
| according to their own words really the ones to expect solutions
| from, as W3C, Inc of all things.
|
| I'm sorry but all I can see is W3C, Inc. acting in their own
| interest, for job security. Because core web standards such as
| HTML are specified elsewhere (basically by random people on
| github, but mostly Google employees and other financially
| dependent people who're calling themselves the WHAT working
| group), leaving only CSS at W3C, and it's a fsking mess. Maybe we
| can get W3C to work on a formal CSS spec or, better even, a
| reference browser rather than la-la specs. Though I fail to see
| how that could be financed under either their old or new funding
| model.
| robin_reala wrote:
| They had a reference browser, but it looks like it's been
| dormant for a decade: https://www.w3.org/Amaya/
| ZiiS wrote:
| Amaya specifically disagreed we should use "Browsers";
| preferring that everyone could contribute by accessing the
| web via an "Editor". Calling it a browser shows how far it
| failed to achieve that.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Nowadays, all the large browsers come with development
| tools that are much more powerful than Amaya (Firefox even
| has a developers edition that centers the UX around those
| tools). People still use them for debugging, not
| development, because the web is inherently a client-server
| environment that does not allow development done by the
| client.
|
| This is more of a "what were they thinking?" situation than
| we actually losing anything.
| culi wrote:
| I think Amaya's vision is much closer to the original
| vision of the web though. CSS was made with the idea of
| each user having their own stylesheet in mind so they
| could browse the web however they wanted.
|
| Obviously CSS has evolved way beyond that nowadays and
| you need an extension on most browsers to even use
| something like that. But I think there's a value in a
| project like Amaya making these tools front and center
| instead of stashing them away in ways only "developers"
| are meant to use. I'd hope it'd cultivate a sense making
| the web work the way you want it to work amongst the
| general userbase
|
| I would actually like to see the project reborn some day
| slim wrote:
| the fact it's client-server does not mean there needs to
| be custom server development. see webdav.
| goto11 wrote:
| Editor-in-the-browser was re-introduced with
| `contentEditable` in IE6.
| bawolff wrote:
| No love for netscape composer?
| anotheraccount9 wrote:
| Netscape (browser, editor, ...) was one of the best thing
| that came out of this period.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Netscape was bundling a full WYSIWG + markup editor with
| their browser in '97, a few years before IE6 came out. It
| was _kinda_ separate by my recollection, but still
| basically felt like part of the browser, though it may
| have been possible to install the browser stand-alone (it
| 's been too long, I don't remember)
| culi wrote:
| Well they still refer to it as a web editor, but I think
| it's hard for the rest of us, who've only known browsers,
| to catch up on that
| recuter wrote:
| > I'm sorry but all I can see is W3C, Inc. acting in their own
| interest, for job security.
|
| It is painfully obvious that just about everybody who speaks in
| that certain way is primarily/exclusively concerned with their
| own job security. Welcome to Zombocom.
| mort96 wrote:
| Funny that most of those "ideals" of theirs are directly
| contradicted by their support for DRM. Being a "force for
| good", "inclusive", "respectful to its users", "people rather
| than profits", "that works for everyone"? Utter bullshit.
| Profits for media conglomerates are clearly more important to
| them than all of those values.
| bdougherty wrote:
| DRM is not good, but if they didn't specify DRM, it would
| still end up in browsers as proprietary methods, or it's
| possible proprietary browser plugins like Flash would have
| continued to exist. Unfortunately, you can't just make the
| people pushing for DRM go away by not specifying it.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > ...by their support for DRM
|
| I'm going to be Devil's advocate here and say that DRM
| ostensibly protects the IP of content originators who I think
| we'd agree should be rewarded for investing in or creating
| that content.
|
| Perhaps you have some other scheme or perspective on how
| content originators/creators can/could/should monetize their
| IP without DRM? Genuinely curious what alternative schemes
| are viable for protecting and rewarding content creators.
|
| (Yes; let's all acknowledge that even with DRM, pirating
| still exists)
| bobajeff wrote:
| DRM, especially the kind used in browsers, is cracked all
| the time. So the claim that it 'protects IP' is false. It
| mainly just adds a barrier to creating compatible competing
| browsers/players.
|
| Edit: Here's a worthy read for the topic:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20140906214521/https://plus.goo
| g...
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| I already acknowledged this; there's no such thing as
| perfect DRM and there can never be. There are a million
| and one ways to copy content, DRM be damned. But for the
| majority of users, there is a balance between
| inconvenience, quality, and cost that DRM tips the
| balance just enough for a part of the market.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| The problem is that DRM only has to fail/be cracked
| _once_ for every piece of media. If users who wanted to
| pirate something had to crack the DRM every single time,
| I 'd be with you. But that doesn't happen. Instead, scene
| groups crack them and upload the media on torrent sites
| and the like, then it's just like any other pirated piece
| of content.
|
| In terms of convenience DRM doesn't change a thing,
| because from the consumer's perspective it's all there on
| a torrent site, there's no way to even know if something
| had DRM unless you look it up specifically.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Online games include anti-cheat software. I'd argue that
| this is also "anti-consumer" because it forces me -- a
| non-cheater -- to install monitoring software. Not only
| that, despite this anti-cheat software, there are still
| cheaters in every online game!
|
| Do you take the same view that game developers should
| just abandon anti-cheat because it can be cracked? Should
| online games just abandon anti-cheat schemes? Would that
| be a better experience for the gamers and the
| developers/publishers if we just abandoned anti-cheat
| because it's not perfect and there are always cheaters?
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| In the case of DRM it's different. The inconvenience
| threshold is only about non-pirated to pirated, not
| "pirated (no DRM originally) to pirated (with DRM
| originally)"
| uncomputation wrote:
| Faulty analogy. The lack of DRM would not hamper _my_
| enjoyment of the media, as the lack of anti-cheating ware
| would hamper my enjoyment of a shared game. Put simply,
| DRM is about protecting the _creator_ , anti-cheat is
| about protecting the _consumer_.
|
| FWIW, I pay for nearly all the streaming apps and still
| get the file itself through ${other means} because I want
| it for offline viewing/future viewing etc just like we
| used to be able to with DVDs. If the streaming provider
| provided this file, I wouldn't need to resort to these
| other means and they wouldn't lose a customer who now
| already has to have an alternate pathway to get a soft
| copy of the file.
| herczegzsolt wrote:
| I'd say yes. Anti-cheat and anti-crack has created far
| too many issues for me as a legitimate customer. I prefer
| paying for DRM-less content and opensource software, and
| i'd choose to pay them over commercially protected
| alternatives anytime.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > Anti-cheat and anti-crack has created far too many
| issues for me as a legitimate customer.
|
| Let me get this straight, though: you would rather that
| CoD, Fortnite, LoL, Lichess, etc. just make it open
| season; no anti-cheat. You believe that as a gamer, your
| gaming experience would be enhanced if there was no anti-
| cheat.
|
| If that's your logical conclusion -- that no anti-cheat
| is the answer because there are always going to be some
| cheaters -- then I have nothing. We'll just have to agree
| to disagree. As a gamer, I'm happy to install anti-cheat
| if it can defeat the majority of casual cheaters -- even
| if it costs some frames or adds overhead to the startup
| time.
| charcircuit wrote:
| The flaw with your theory is that it's not browser or
| video player sellers who are pushing for DRM. What
| interest does Netflix have in preventing competing
| browsers / players?
| fabrice_d wrote:
| A major DRM scheme is Widewine, controlled by no other
| than Google. So you have Google which is a browser
| vendor, an OS vendor and DRM gatekeeper. Even if as you
| say Netflix is fine with competing browsers/players, as
| long as they use Widewine they put everyone else at the
| mercy of Google's decisions. This is absolutely anti-
| user, anti-competitive madness. Mozilla pushed back as
| long as possible but had to give up.
| charcircuit wrote:
| You do know that Firefox supports using Widevine too?
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _DRM ostensibly protects the IP_
|
| Ostensibly is doing a lot of work here because it
| _literally does not._ I can torrent any show or movie that
| is otherwise being streamed with DRM. DRM is a complete
| farce that serves no actual purpose but to make idiotic
| media executives happy.
| conradev wrote:
| It's a little strong to say it "literally does not" when
| I cannot break L1 Widevine, which uses the W3C's APIs
|
| _You_ might be able to torrent any show or movie in high
| quality with a private tracker, but it 's hard to come by
| 4K HDR content just hanging out for free these days.
| TheNorthman wrote:
| > You might be able to torrent any show or movie in high
| quality with a private tracker, but it's hard to come by
| 4K HDR content just hanging out for free these days.
|
| Even if that's the case, that's not an issue of DRM,
| that's an issue of distribution.
|
| It's also just flat out not true. Sure, some of the 4k
| HDR content might originate from PTP/BTN/scene/w.e., but
| it's readily available on e.g. RARBG.
| mort96 wrote:
| I do not care. Even if DRM was magic and perfectly
| prevented piracy, it's not appropriate in the web. We're in
| a situation where it's intentionally impossible to write an
| open-source browser which can render any standard web page.
| That's not an acceptable state of affairs.
|
| EDIT: Wow, I didn't expect "it should be legal to make an
| open source web browser which can render any standard web
| page" to be so controversial. I'm disappointed.
| charcircuit wrote:
| DRM is only unable on audio and video tags. You can still
| render the rest of the page. Often sites will gracefully
| fallback onto a lower quality version of the content if
| you don't support DRM. You could also just use widevine
| from your open source browser to play it.
| mort96 wrote:
| I'm not sure why you are telling me this. It is correct
| (aside from typos), but doesn't affect what I said.
|
| FYI, widevine is not open source.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Widevine isn't a browser. Similarly running GNU bash on
| Windows doesn't suddenly make GNU bash no longer open
| source even though it is calling out to closed source
| code.
| mort96 wrote:
| An open source browser can not render standard web pages.
| A browser can either be open source and unable to render
| DRM content, or it can contain closed-source components
| and be able to render DRM content. Firefox + Widevine is
| the second kind, Firefox without Widevine is the first
| kind. It is illegal to make a fully open source browser
| which can render any standard web page.
| nerdbert wrote:
| That's missing the point, I think. The HTML spec includes
| elements that cannot be rendered using open source
| software. Yes, of course other parts of the page can be
| rendered (at least today) but it's absurd for them to
| claim that they are supporting open standards.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| As far as I can tell, piracy exists for exactly two
| reasons:
|
| 1. Content is priced way the fuck higher than market value.
|
| 2. Content is so encumbered that it is difficult to even
| get it or use it.
|
| The way I see it is that #1 is not a problem for content
| creators. It is relatively rare compared to people buying
| content and the person who would rather download an episode
| of The Office rather than paying Apple $1.99 for it was
| unlikely to pay if that was the only option in the first
| place. Their alternative to piracy isn't to spend the
| money. It's to watch something else.
|
| As for #2, it is a self-inflicted wound. There was a time
| when the 6th Harry Potter movie was about to come out in
| theaters. I wanted to do a marathon watch of the first 5
| movies with my family. I had the first 4 on DVD and wanted
| to buy the 5th. I checked all streaming services and none
| had it. In fact it appeared that some removed it a month
| prior. I then called several nearby stores and all were
| sold out. A store 20 miles away had a copy for $40. After
| spending nearly an hour to find this out, I spent 5 minutes
| downloading it off a torrent site. Maybe indestructible
| your content will net you more money even if you have some
| of your content pirated.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Are either of these true?
|
| For $17/mo, I can access an endless stream of content on
| Netflix. This is way cheaper than I remember my cable
| subscriptions used to be (if we consider the cost of
| Internet access as fixed in either case). Verizon is even
| offering to throw in Hulu, Disney+, and a bunch of other
| streaming services "free" if I switch to FIOS + mobile.
|
| I can watch Netflix on my phone, tablet, PC, TV,
| Chromecast, Roku, Apple TV. I can watch any show, any
| time I want, as many seasons and episodes as I want.
| 24x7x365. Is it really encumbered? Aside from IP owners
| walling off their services, content -- as long as you pay
| for it -- flows more freely now than ever, IMO. If I go
| to an Airbnb, I can log into my Netflix account and watch
| all of my shows. I can log into my Amazon account and
| watch all of my purchased movies. (Just don't forget to
| log out!)
|
| Yes; I can't watch it offline or if I'm in a location
| with poor Internet speeds. But that is such a small
| fraction of my time that it hardly registers. Yes; my
| right to view content I've paid for can be revoked in
| some circumstance I'm sure, but it's never once happened
| to me.
| stonogo wrote:
| Yes, it's encumbered. You are beholden, across all of
| your examples, to binary compatibility of a .so file
| Google refuses to distribute for any platform except
| x86_64 and 32-bit ARM. The fact that you have a lot of
| such devices does nothing for the people who want to
| either consume the content on other devices or develop
| new devices for the purpose.
|
| Much like DVD region locking, the majority of the
| population doesn't care, and those who do are capable of
| overcoming the DRM anyway, but the latter is illegal, and
| leaves no room _at all_ for people who want to comply
| with the law but not with Google 's device mandates.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Dollars to donuts, I bet content available on Netflix is
| pirated a lot less than content that is not. Gel
| restrictions, content contractors expiring, not being
| able to watch it on a plane, etc. all do contribute, but
| Netflix is fairly priced for what it has (which is far
| from everything) and fairly easily available.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Yes, and NetFlix is a great example. Prior to the
| existence of NetFlix video piracy was extensive and
| widespread, once NetFlix appeared that piracy was greatly
| reduced as the "value" was there (it was more convenient
| to pay NetFlix than to figure out how to pirate stuff).
| It won't be "zero" of course but it was effective enough
| that content companies have emphasized that model over
| encrypted optical media.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > For $17/mo, I can access an endless stream of content
| on Netflix.
|
| $17/month for netflix is great when you have an income.
| As a poor student, that's $17 I can save.
| Shaanie wrote:
| Then pay $9.99 for Netflix Basic or $6.99 and deal with
| ads. If you can't afford that then there's basically no
| price point that makes sense because you're simply not
| willing or able to pay for entertainment.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Both of these points have been repeatedly proven in the
| marketplace.
| mehh wrote:
| So in no part is piracy also because some people like to
| get things without paying ... come on let's be honest!
| throw10920 wrote:
| FWIW, you can make a reasonable argument that _DRM as it
| currently exists_ is not about protecting IP of content
| creators, but instead "giving content providers leverage
| against the creators of playback devices"[1]. To be sure,
| both reasons contribute, but the latter isn't a good one,
| and you can argue that W3C indirectly supported it
| (although, I don't understand why it's preferable for DRM
| to be implemented through entirely non-standard protocol as
| opposed to having the W3C make something of a standard for
| it).
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709939
| charcircuit wrote:
| DRM protects content creators from copyright infringement.
| Protecting against copyright infringement, something which is
| illegal and can hurt creators, is a force for good.
|
| DRM would exist on the web with or without standardization
| from the W3C.
| mort96 wrote:
| DRM is the epitome of prioritizing profits rather than
| people and disrespecting users. In search of profits for
| their stakeholders, the WHATWG and the W3C has made it
| impossible to make an open source web browser which can
| render standard web pages.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Disrespecting users? As if users stealing your content is
| not disrespectful to the owners of it. You can not just
| selectively ignore groups of stakeholders whom you are
| not a member of. The web should be made good for
| everyone.
|
| >the WHATWG and the W3C has made it impossible to make an
| open source web browser which can render standard web
| pages.
|
| Chromium is an open source browser which can do that.
| xigoi wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
| mort96 wrote:
| Chromium can render DRM content using a closed source
| component. An open source browser can not render standard
| web pages, because DRM is part of the standard and DRM
| requires a closed-source component.
| charcircuit wrote:
| You are free to make an open source CDM and convince
| people to use it, but good luck with that.
| nerdbert wrote:
| I don't think DRM protects content at all.
|
| Every DRM scheme out there has been broken (or will be
| soon, if it just came out). It is trivially easy for any
| interested party to find copies of content with DRM
| removed. In fact I'd say this content is more accessible
| than if there were no DRM and the only obstacle were having
| to splice together chunks of unencrypted stream data
| transmitted by the authorized source. I was at someone's
| house the other day, a Netflix subscriber mind you, and the
| Netflix app wouldn't work on his laptop for whatever
| reason. He went to a pirate site and had the show playing
| within 30 seconds.
|
| What DRM does protect, is the market position of equipment
| and software vendors that have the resources to sign on as
| DRM licensees.
| lucideer wrote:
| While it's a shame that support for DRM went through, this is
| an org that's already suffering criticism for being
| "irrelevant", through no fault of their own other than a
| bunch of large rich corporations decided to throw their
| efforts behind a more expedient force (WHATWG). It's
| understandable to see why they would fear the same happening
| with DRM (implementers decided to go with non-W3 specs in
| order to add DRM support).
|
| The above comment is a perfect example: criticising the W3C
| for being a "fsking mess" due to forces outside of their
| control (the ownership of web tech by a very small number of
| very wealthy web client corporations).
|
| It's just the way things have gone.
| mort96 wrote:
| I could forgive it if their stance was simply, "this is
| unfortunate but there is nothing we can do about it". But
| that wasn't their stance. Tim Berners-Lee (you know, the
| director of the W3C) was publicly endorsing DRM.
|
| You're right that the W3C has no actual power to dictate
| what gets standardised anymore; they squandered that, so
| now only WHATWG's word matters in the end. The only power
| the W3C has is their ability to influence public opinion,
| their voice is still rather meaningful in the public
| debate. They could've used that voice for good, taking the
| side of the EFF and other pro-freedom organisations to
| denounce DRM. In the end, they would have had to
| begrudgingly accept WHATWG's DRM standard if it came to
| that, but they could've made it clear along the way that
| it's a terrible idea. This would've put them squarely in
| the pro-open-web camp, and would've made it clear to the
| public that the WHATWG is in the anti-open-web camp.
|
| Or they could've stayed out of the discussion, accepted
| their irrelevance, and just adopted the W3C spec.
|
| But they chose to actively enter the public debate around
| DRM _in favour of_ this user-hostile, anti-open-web
| standard. They chose to use their influence to convince
| people that DRM is a good thing. They 're on the record as
| being in favour of a web where it is impossible to make a
| proper open-source web browser which can render any
| standard web page.
|
| In my book, the W3C's stance is clear as day: they're
| actively hostile to an open web, and they're prepared to
| spend any influence they might have to fight against it.
| IncRnd wrote:
| "This is the complete list of patent disclosures and
| exclusions that have been made through IPP, for all W3C
| groups." [1]
|
| The latest 26 patents (the 2021 patents) are all in Apple's
| name. It's pretty clear _what_ they do, which is different
| from the marketing speak.
|
| [1] https://www.w3.org/2004/01/pp-impl/patents
| whatgroupsajoke wrote:
| Those WHAT group folks are a joke. Look a this person. Asked
| about an Accept Header on the windows.open function. They just
| gave them the run around.
|
| https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/7810
| dannyobrien wrote:
| if that's a "runaround", i have terrible news about every
| other standards body, including the w3c
| [deleted]
| Aissen wrote:
| I'm guessing this means that the legal hurdles with the MIT are
| over ? https://mastodon.social/@robin/109524929231432913
| jmbwell wrote:
| Here's hoping W3C has a better chance today, with people
| increasingly aware that the web's commercial interests are
| largely counter to the interests of a free and open society, and
| with WHATWG dominated by those very commercial interests.
|
| Maybe W3C bungled things with XHMTL 10 years ago, trying to pull
| the web toward TBL's original vision of something like a giant
| Wikipedia. But things are very different now, having spent the
| interim in service to browser vendors and their monetization of
| control over user data.
|
| The mission is arguably much clearer now.
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