Re: New resource: Normative References to W3C Standards

On Friday, April 19, 2013 at 10:27 AM, Daniel Glazman wrote:

> On 19/04/13 11:17, Marcos Caceres wrote:
> 
> > > The fact the WHATWG spec is a "living standard" also makes it totally
> > > impossible for a third-party to validate a webapp against a given state
> > > of the art.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > I don't know what that means. Can't you just open up a bunch of browsers and test your app in those? Like you said, they are updated regularly and follow the WHATWG spec closely.
> 
> Exactly what I said, you don't understand their constraints at all,
> you probably never worked for such companies.

I have actually. I worked at a university's IT department for two years as a web dev. We tested apps across all browsers. No big deal if you don't use proprietary stuff (only IE6 sucked because it was the browser that was _not updated in a regular manner to support the latest standards_). 
> Large companies have hundreds of critical webapps. Testing them -
> and I mean testing every single feature of them - against a given
> version of ONE Web browser takes between a few weeks and a few months.

If they want to write their internal web apps for one browser, then that's fine. And if they want their employees to be stuck on the same crappy feature set and not get security updates, that's their choice. 

But for the public facing web, you gotta serve your customers and they come at you with different browsers - yeah, users suck with their freedom of choice in browsers 0_o.   
> Testing against "a bunch of browsers" takes months. In the meantime,
> the spec has changed, the browsers have changed; the spec URL now
> shows the latest edits and the older browsers are hard to download.
> This is not a sustainable situation for such users.

You are making it sound like every time there is a browser update the whole world catches on fire - which is ridiculous. Users use different browsers: if companies want to be on "the Web", then that's the cost of doing business.

> > The fact that they are already relying on the Web for "hyper-critical apps" (whatever that is) is already proof that it's working - and that governments are using it, is also a good indicator.
> 
> Let me laugh. Did you follow the Mozilla Entreprise mailing-list when
> the fast release process was announced ?!? Maybe you should dive into
> that list and read it.

I did follow the discussion. 
> > Somehow, I don't think so.
> 
> I don't ask you to. A large part of corporate users of the Web
> do. 

They can enforce whatever policies they want internally, but slowing down innovation and updates for everyone else is not an option. Random utilities companies don't rule the Web and don't get to dictate when browser vendors or their users update their browsers.

> That should be enough to make all of us think twice about
> our standards processes, including WHATWG. But since we already
> said that multiple times in the past, I guess it's worthless at
> least on the WHATWG side.

The web serves humanity at large, in addition to "corporate users". I'm pretty sure that fast updates, new features, and security fixes that benefit _all_ users trump the few corporate users who say "oh, we can't keep up! please slow down".

Received on Friday, 19 April 2013 10:01:11 UTC