<story><title>W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns</title><url>https://boingboing.net/2017/09/18/antifeatures-for-all.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>near</author><text>The web has been engineered to a complexity level so grossly obscene that it is all but impossible for independent developers to produce fully independent web browsers anymore. You would need hundreds of millions of dollars in capital and strong leadership to produce a browser that would be successful in today&amp;#x27;s world.&lt;p&gt;I could dedicate the rest of my life working 100 hours a week on a browser, and I would die before I had something that could compete with browsers of 2017, let alone of the browsers far into the future at my demise. The standards grow in complexity faster than a small team of developers could possibly keep up with.&lt;p&gt;The best we have are attempts at forks of major browser engines, which will never gain any serious traction to have any power over the direction of web standards.&lt;p&gt;If people want to do something about it, they need to fork the web itself. HTTP, TLS, HTML, CSS, JS ... the entire stack needs to be scrapped and replaced with something sensible with a focus on simplicity. If a single highly talented developer working full-time can&amp;#x27;t implement a reasonable browser within a year, then the standard is too complex. This will of course never happen.&lt;p&gt;And so, on the subject of DRM, we&amp;#x27;ve officially lost the war today. And combined with the impending loss of net neutrality, brace yourselves everyone: it&amp;#x27;s only going to get worse from here on out.</text></item><item><author>RcouF1uZ4gsC</author><text>Basically, unless you are writing a browser with decent marketshare, you defacto have no voice in making the standards. Basically, the only voices that matter are Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari), Google(Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge&amp;#x2F;Explorer). Despite what any standard says, web developers are going to go by the behavior of the browsers do. The only company on the list of browser makers that really has any desire to try to exclude DRM is Mozilla, and unfortunately, if they do that, the users will switch to the browser that makes watching Netflix easiest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tudorw</author><text>If we want to win that war, we should focus on content not technology, Mosaic got a lead in the game because, despite the &amp;#x27;techies&amp;#x27; seeing no use for images, image support was added, with images came the transition of media, users were au fait with articles containing text and images and could now experience similar on line, this alone was not enough, content creators starting creating content that people wanted to consume, that&amp;#x27;s what drove people to &amp;#x27;get online&amp;#x27;, they were missing out.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong, it&amp;#x27;s still a long shot, but if an organisation could build a raft of talent, get that talent to make content that was only available on an open and progressive platform, then you might get some traction. So what might that look like, well, say I had the funds to secure 100 of the worlds best financial journalists and only delivered that content on a novel protocol, do you think I might be able to persuade some people to run a novel application to access that content, oh hang on, did I just describe Bloomberg...</text></comment>
<story><title>W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns</title><url>https://boingboing.net/2017/09/18/antifeatures-for-all.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>near</author><text>The web has been engineered to a complexity level so grossly obscene that it is all but impossible for independent developers to produce fully independent web browsers anymore. You would need hundreds of millions of dollars in capital and strong leadership to produce a browser that would be successful in today&amp;#x27;s world.&lt;p&gt;I could dedicate the rest of my life working 100 hours a week on a browser, and I would die before I had something that could compete with browsers of 2017, let alone of the browsers far into the future at my demise. The standards grow in complexity faster than a small team of developers could possibly keep up with.&lt;p&gt;The best we have are attempts at forks of major browser engines, which will never gain any serious traction to have any power over the direction of web standards.&lt;p&gt;If people want to do something about it, they need to fork the web itself. HTTP, TLS, HTML, CSS, JS ... the entire stack needs to be scrapped and replaced with something sensible with a focus on simplicity. If a single highly talented developer working full-time can&amp;#x27;t implement a reasonable browser within a year, then the standard is too complex. This will of course never happen.&lt;p&gt;And so, on the subject of DRM, we&amp;#x27;ve officially lost the war today. And combined with the impending loss of net neutrality, brace yourselves everyone: it&amp;#x27;s only going to get worse from here on out.</text></item><item><author>RcouF1uZ4gsC</author><text>Basically, unless you are writing a browser with decent marketshare, you defacto have no voice in making the standards. Basically, the only voices that matter are Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari), Google(Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge&amp;#x2F;Explorer). Despite what any standard says, web developers are going to go by the behavior of the browsers do. The only company on the list of browser makers that really has any desire to try to exclude DRM is Mozilla, and unfortunately, if they do that, the users will switch to the browser that makes watching Netflix easiest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>l0b0</author><text>You wouldn&amp;#x27;t need to scrap all of it by a long shot. You could take a small subset of the stack and make something enormously simpler to implement. Start with supporting only one version of HTTP, TLS, (X)HTML, CSS and JS and fork them if necessary. Even drop CSS to start with and finally start relying on semantic markup and good browser defaults. Use existing open source libraries where available, such as for TLS and markup&amp;#x2F;media parsing. Pull out libraries for everything so the browser is easily composable and forkable. You don&amp;#x27;t want JS support &lt;i&gt;at all?&lt;/i&gt; Compile without it.</text></comment>