<story><title>W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM</title><url>https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/7753</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>userbinator</author><text>This obsession with &amp;quot;living&amp;quot; and constant change seems to be mostly confined to the web --- instead of settling on a spec and then leaving it alone and &amp;quot;doing what you can with what you have&amp;quot;, those working on this stuff seem more inclined with continuing to make browsers change.&lt;p&gt;I suspect at least part of the reason is to build a high barrier to entry and preserve the monopoly, keeping out competitors, given who the people in these groups work for.&lt;p&gt;My personal opinion on this is to stop feeding the monopoly and refuse to use anything other than basic HTML for static content sites.</text></item><item><author>ChrisSD</author><text>I still maintain that the &amp;quot;living standard&amp;quot; is an oxymoron. It&amp;#x27;s a collaborative browser dev document. Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong, that&amp;#x27;s great. However for everyone else an unversioned document, any part of which can change at any moment, is not what&amp;#x27;s usually thought of as a standard.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Ajedi32</author><text>&amp;gt; My personal opinion on this is to stop feeding the monopoly and refuse to use anything other than basic HTML for static content sites.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not going to work for one simple reason: despite HN&amp;#x27;s obsession with plain HTML&amp;#x2F;CSS, these new standards _are_ actually useful. They&amp;#x27;re being created with the express purpose of solving practical problems that developers, site operators, and users are experiencing in the real world. Those stakeholders aren&amp;#x27;t going to just ignore a practical solution to their problem over some esoteric concerns about &amp;quot;feeding the monopoly&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I share your concerns about the proliferation of web standards making it difficult for browser vendors to compete, but if the only alternative you can offer is stagnation I think it&amp;#x27;s completely unsurprising that your concerns go unheeded.</text></comment>
<story><title>W3C and the WHATWG sign agreement to collaborate on single version of HTML, DOM</title><url>https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/7753</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>userbinator</author><text>This obsession with &amp;quot;living&amp;quot; and constant change seems to be mostly confined to the web --- instead of settling on a spec and then leaving it alone and &amp;quot;doing what you can with what you have&amp;quot;, those working on this stuff seem more inclined with continuing to make browsers change.&lt;p&gt;I suspect at least part of the reason is to build a high barrier to entry and preserve the monopoly, keeping out competitors, given who the people in these groups work for.&lt;p&gt;My personal opinion on this is to stop feeding the monopoly and refuse to use anything other than basic HTML for static content sites.</text></item><item><author>ChrisSD</author><text>I still maintain that the &amp;quot;living standard&amp;quot; is an oxymoron. It&amp;#x27;s a collaborative browser dev document. Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong, that&amp;#x27;s great. However for everyone else an unversioned document, any part of which can change at any moment, is not what&amp;#x27;s usually thought of as a standard.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>giancarlostoro</author><text>&amp;gt; I suspect at least part of the reason is to build a high barrier to entry and preserve the monopoly, keeping out competitors, given who the people in these groups work for.&lt;p&gt;A lot of what happens in someone like Chrome implements something not yet standardized, then it gets standardized in a different way, or Mozilla implements something and Chrome implements it differently from the standard, perhaps to try and reach the same goal without a care for the yet to be finalized standard.&lt;p&gt;Of course Embrade, Extend, Extinguish is something I think of mostly in regards to Google, but I rather not think they&amp;#x27;re completely and utterly sinister in their goals. Some parts of Google are bad, just like some parts of Microsoft (sadly) are bad.&lt;p&gt;Go is a good example of the good parts of Google. Sure the core team works for Google, but they make all the decisions, not Google.&lt;p&gt;VS Code is another good example in regards to Microsoft, and soon enough GitHub (which I suspect is implementing a lot of ideas they couldn&amp;#x27;t afford to work on prior to the acquisition).</text></comment>