New HTML Working Group
Tim Berners Lee, the Director of the W3C, has just announced (on his blog, no less) that the W3C will be starting a new Working Group to work on HTML (in parallel to the existing WG, which will concentrate on xHTML).
A few comments about the announcement:
- It doesn’t seem clear how the new and old HTML Working Group’s will interact. I wonder if the old one is being kept around as a compromise for those who still prefer that HTML be a strict XML dialect?
- TimBL mentions the WHATWG, an independent, less formal group with has been working on an alternative future for HTML. According to Hixie (the leader of WHATWG), TimBL is wrong to say that WHATWG has no process. They have a process, which is, as Hixie puts it:
i listen to people, i make a decision, i publish, rinse, repeat.
(source) - I wonder if WHATWG and Hixie in particular have been contacted and/or recruited to join this new WG? I doubt how successful the new HTML WG can be without the support of the the individuals involved in WHATWG.
- TimBL says
As always, we will be insisting on working implementations and test suites.
. I find this somewhat disingenuous, was many existing W3C RECs (recommendations) don’t have test suites and where formalized without having interoperable implementations.
October 27th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
The groups proposed include an HTML WG (which would work on HTML and XHTML at the same time) and an XHTML2 WG (which would work just on XHTML2), it’s not just HTML vs XHTML.
And no, the W3C has not contacted me or the WHATWG community about this.
October 27th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Ryan,
in every comments and remarks it has to be put in timeline and context. Test Suites @ W3C, you are right for the past it is not the case anymore. And that is a very hard work. W3C is ten years old and its process has evolved and things have been learned little by little, step by step. And I’m pretty sure that it would be better in the next years. And some of the things we do know would seem not enough in 5 years.
May I also remind you that Ian Hickson is an employee of Google, company Member of W3C, and that he’s a participant in the WAF WG AND the CSS WG.
October 27th, 2006 at 11:07 pm
Ian-
Thanks for pointing that out. Reading it again, it appears that there will actually be 3 related working groups, an HTML WG, working on HTML and XHTML, a Forms group to work on XForms and a superset of HTML forms, and an XHTML 2 working group. So I guess it’s a bit more complex than I initially realized.
Karl-
I understand that the W3C has and is evolving and I applaud all efforts to work to make it work better.
It’s not clear to me as an outsider, though, when test suites became mandatory. Obviously it has been somewhat recently, as some very important specifications, like XHTML, lack test suites.
Granted that the W3C is improving the situation regarding test suites, I still think that Tim’s assertion of is less than accurate. The W3C may claim that it has always insisted on such things, but somehow many specs have made it to REC status without a test suite.
About Hixie, I know that he works for a member organization. I didn’t mean to imply that he should get special treatment regarding the new working group. I wasn’t very clear, but my point is that I think the WHATWG are far along the road that the new HTML WG should take and that to replicate that work would be a waste.
I can’t speak for Hixie or the WHATWG, but it’d be nice to see the W3C working along with the WHATWG on the future of HTML.
Well, actually, I don’t care if they work together or not, I just want useful specifications that I can implement and I’m afraid that we may end up with two HTMLs (as if we don’t have multiple already)– the official one, and the useful one. That’s not the kind of dilemma I want to face as an implementor and author.
October 28th, 2006 at 3:01 am
About Test Suites:
The Quality Assurance Activity has been started at the end of 2001. I was hired to start it. It has a very looooong process to change people’s mind of the need for them. You can’t change cultures in one day. Many software engineers, like Ian Hickson, are participating to groups. Some of the people in these groups have dynamics and history. And sometimes they are not inclined to change their ol’ good methods. So with a bit of process, a bit of tools and a lot of time explaining the benefits we move forward. For example, the CSS WG has been one of the very first WGs to be very active in testing domain. You can ask your work colleague ;) Tantek.
XHTML 1.0 has been published before the time of the QA Activity and the before the Process was a bit stricter on this. As I said in my initial comment, there is a lot of room for progress and there will be. One of my dream at W3C is to make WGs having quality checking far more in advance as having no discussion about features without test cases at the same time. But that will take time, people don’t want generally to be told how to work. So you have to convince them and with credible arguments. That’s fair.
No specs made it to Rec these last 4 years without a Test Suite :) and it is somehow difficult to do. There are a lot of issues like Test cases licenses. It is happening all the time in the open source community, for example Apache. And without entering into a useless context, I do not see a lot of organizations out there proposing test suites. Completion of the test suites is also something which is not easy to do. Test cases doesn’t make a test suite. And unfortunately time, companies and invited experts participating to W3C and making the standards have only 24 hours in a day and they are not working full time on WGs.
The “As always” from Tim has to be understood, I guess, as *right now* W3C WGs always do. You can check the QA Matrix for example http://www.w3.org/QA/TheMatrix
WHAT WG has already given part of its work to the W3C, XMLHttpRequest, File Upload, and there might be more I guess. Read the first page of WHAT WG.
“”"
Shouldn’t this work be done at the W3C or IETF?
Many of the members of this working group are active supporters and members of the W3C and other standardization bodies. Parts of the work have already been submitted to the W3C, and we intend to work more closely with the W3C in future. The technical work is currently focused on developing the specifications to levels appropriate for the W3C Last Call stage.
Several members of this working group attended The W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents. The position paper submitted by Opera and Mozilla represents the fundamental principles upon which the WHAT working group intends to operate.
“”"
Agreed for not having multiple versions of HTML and I’m pretty sure is neither the attempt of WHAT WG or W3C. This move is made specifically to foster the community effort and to acknowledge the need of the Web communities.
October 28th, 2006 at 3:24 am
[...] 有一組不隸屬 W3C 的人員另組的 WHATWG，制定 HTML5/XHTML5, Web Form 2.0 一段時間了，發言人 Ian Hickson 表示 W3C 並未知會他們。 [...]
October 30th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
If we shouldn’t have multiple versions of HTML (we already do: 3.2, 4.0, 4.01; Strict, Transtional, Frameset), then why should we have multiple new HTML working groups?
Can the W3C give us reasons not to believe the announcement is a response to the fact that someone *other* than the W3C has been plausibly writing a spec?
If WHAT WG weren’t doing a plausible job, would this new group have been announced?
Was it announced because the W3C cannot bear the thought of anyone other than the W3C defining the specs for the Web?
Is this not another attempt to assert a monopoly position, one that is rather doomed to fail and actually undermine the stated goals of the group? After all, W3C HTML 5 and WHAT WG “HTML5” cannot both exist and be supported, can they? (Whatever happens when we get to elements and attributes with identical names in both specs but different definitions – dl/dt/dd, for example?)
October 30th, 2006 at 9:23 pm
Hi Joe,
The W3C can give you the reason that is announced in Tim’s message. People and community asked for it. It doesn’t come out of the hat. The next step is to have the charters reviewed, to maximize the participation, browser developers have been positively responsive so far with for sure comments, but that is part of the game. And something that everyone tend to forget, it is said “plan to charter”, which means in plain English (far better than my usual broken prose) that it is not yet created.
About WHATWG, I can’t speak for them. At least for some browser developers, they stated positive position (look for example at www-html for public statements). Just something, we can notice. WHATWG has already transfered part of its work to W3C in the WebAPI WG for example.
There are also issues with IPs. Having a legal framework where you can guarantee that there will not be patents coming to bite you later on is important to have stability for the final developers and users. Yes that’s not really fun, but we have to deal with this in our world.
October 30th, 2006 at 9:41 pm
Joe, this line of questioning reminds me of that Jon Stewart bit about how Fox and CNN use question marks to not really ask anything pertinent but rather spread misinformation.
(I’d leave a choice quote from it here but refrain out of respect… ;)
August 13th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
[...] The Web Standards Fluster Cuck Clucking bell, Molly Holzshlag really has kicked the web standards beehive with a blog post expressing her great discontent with the W3C and WaSP. Now, before you head off and read the post and the 60+ comments, here’s a bit of background on why I find this post of interest (and rather depressing): I’ve been following Molly’s work for a while now. She first came on to my radar when after providing an update on the progress made between the Microsoft IE, VS and .NET teams and the Web Standards Project (WaSP). That was in 2005. Then in January 2007, I noted Molly’s announcement that she had left WASP to join the IE team on a contract basis to work on standards and interoperability issues. I was pleased to see the IE team was making a real effort. Entirely seperately, but not entirely, in October of 2006 Tim Berners-Lee called for the reinvention of HTML. His call to action caused a bit of a hoo-ha at the time. What’s that got to do with Molly? Well, as noted, some of the reactions to TBL’s post varied from skepticism, to ‘About time!’ - and here’s the connection with Molly’s latest post - to what role the WHATWG will play in what presumably could be a competing effort to the HTML 5 (or XHTML5) spec in progress at the time. However, I was pleased to hear TBL’s public calling for progress and hoped we might see some of this progrss after HTML’s 8-year stagnation. Then in July 2007, we had the news that HTML5 was being considered by the W3C. Confused? You should be. So after my ridiculously inadequate backgrounder, you can now go ahead and read Molly’s post, along with the contributions be the cast of characters (the commenters), some of whom are affiliated with various competing factions wrestling with the future of web standards and HTML, who somehow manage to converge the various threads (now including a Fear of Air, the Semantic Web, microformats, Silverlight, XML, community, accessibility, transparency and who-knows-what-else) into what looks like a complete political mess (read: fluster cuck). Yes, it is depressing,, but such is the business of web standards agreement. A messy business indeed…There’s even a YouTube video covering the drama - HTML5 trailer - Find your Hero. - Thanks to Thomas Vander Wal for the link to Molly’s post. Posted: Aug 13 2007, 06:58 PM by alexbarnett | with no comments Filed under: Web, microformats, Programming, VisualStudio, .NET, Internet, crap, semanticweb, XML, HTML, Adobe, IE, Apollo, community, silverlight, HTML5 [...]