Join the W3C Exploration Interest Group: where standards start
18 comments
·April 22, 2025hnuser123456
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zb3
Standards start at Google nowadays..
Y-bar
… And that's clearly a major concern because my front end developer colleagues treat everything that Google does as the one true way of the web. No matter if it is accepted into a standards body, or if the Chrome implementation is buggy, that is their target and every other browser is an after-thought at best.
zcw100
Historically nothing has changed just who’s on top. Mosaic, Netscape, IE, Chrome…
Etheryte
I think this misses the point. If the vast majority of your users use something Chromium based, that's where you should put most of your effort. It doesn't matter if it's the right way or whatnot, your users only care about whether it works for them or not. Users don't care about the technicalities.
fuzzzerd
While true and a pragmatic approach, that's another part of the same root problem.
zelon88
Considering the HTML provided by google dot com has 19 warnings and a Content-Security-Policy error for a page that only has a text field and a logo, I'm gonna take my chances and apply to become a W3C invited expert.
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bryanlarsen
AFAICT, the W3C produces 2 types of standards:
- standards they write themselves that everyone ignores - standards they copy from the WHATWG
magicalist
> standards they write themselves that everyone ignores
CSS, WAI-ARIA, SVG, WebGPU, WebAuthn...and a large number of APIs that are referenced as part of the HTML spec but developed and standardized by different W3C groups.
> standards they copy from the WHATWG
Not for six years now: https://www.w3.org/blog/2019/w3c-and-whatwg-to-work-together...
Lots of hn people need to update their priors about modern web standardization work.
robto
I think the RDF standards have produced many useful tools for those that work with graph data. And the W3C is a useful coordination place for new standards like Verifiable Credentials[0] and Decentralized identifiers[1] and JSON Linked Data[2], which are all being used in ActivityPub, Bluesky, and a lot of other decentralizing projects.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON-LD
rhdunn
The CSS and specs are maintained by W3C and are widely implemented by browsers. Likewise for the WAI-ARIA, WCAG, MathML, and SVG specs.
The XML and related specs are implemented by various applications and libraries even if web browsers dislike these specs. -- They are used a lot in document publishing workflows that use formats like JATS, and are supported by various tools and libraries.
SVG is widely supported in vector graphics applications and rendering tools.
And WHATWG hasn't just co-opted W3C specs -- it's also co-opted encoding, URIs and others from places like the RFCs.
wizzwizz4
Which is ActivityPub?
immibis
An incompatible attempt at reformulating Mastodon Protocol. If you've ever actually tried to work with the protocol, you'll know the standard only loosely describes it. If you attempt to implement it by following the standard, you won't be compatible with anything else, because everything else implements Mastodon Protocol instead (and calls it ActivityPub).
bryanlarsen
If that's your best example of a well used w3c native standard, thanks for helping me prove my point.
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null
I think we should have a standard for browser extensions that allows extensions to inspect and drop requests for unwanted ad resources.