Talk:Web standards

W3C is not the only source of web standards

Web standards should not redirect to W3C. Sure the W3C has published the official recommendations for many standards, but not all of them (RSS & microformats, for example). And web standards is so much more than just what the w3c lays down. I'm removing the redirect, putting a stub page up for now. Come on, with all the great web folks on wikipedia, this page should be enlightening. - Crenner 22:32, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Web standards movement

MJB, I think you're confusing web standards (as in the 'web standards movement') with internet standards here. When web professionals use the term 'web standards' they're talking about building sites with XHTML and CSS (separation of content and presentation), usability, accessibility, etc. Web standards has nothing to do with the unicode standard or internet protocols. It's true that these are not neccessarily 'standards' in the traditional sense. This article should be more clear on that, but you can't deny the meaning of web standards—do a google search. Zeldman's book, 456 Berea Street, all XHTML and CSS stuff. And when the w3c shows up first, why shouldn't they be mentioned in the article? What does "do not misrepresent the W3C as a disinterested body - it is a bunch of coporations" mean? The w3c is an independent non-profit body, and it's contribution to the state of web practices today are certainly worth mention. -Crenner 19:36, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Is this an article about the Web standards movement? Looks to me like an article about Web standards, as in, standards applicable to the Web —or, given the article's intro, selected standards of interest to a certain, vocal class of Web site developers during the rise of the Firefox browser (mid-2003 to present). If it is about the movement (for which a Google search on "Web standards movement" reveals sufficient documentation, and not just on webstandards.org), then it should be renamed.

Obviously I'm a bit skeptical of the movement's motives, as it seems to be closely related to pro-Firefox (and to a lesser extent, pro-OSS) campaigns. Its advocates seem to be rather selective in which standards they care about; we must do WP:No original research, which in this case means we can't use Wikipedia as a means of solidifying the definition of "Web standards" to mean only those selected Web-related standards that proponents of the movement want the term to apply to. The way I see it, "Web standards" is a very general term that is being hijacked, and we have to be careful how it is presented here.

Regarding the characterization of the W3C, casual proponents of the movement tend to imply in their writings that all Web standards are the product of disinterested bodies that only generate well-thought-out specifications in advance of implementations, and that software that deviates from said specs is undermining the usability of the Web. The reality is that W3C is far, far from the neutral guardian of principles that people want to believe. While some of its 'standards' are actually fairly principled and preceded commercial implementations (like CSS2, XML, XHTML, XPath1, XSLT, RDF), there are many other examples where W3C Recommendations are rubber-stamps on existing commercial technologies (HTML3, CSS1, DOM, Ruby) and/or reflect the way certain corporate W3C members want people to do things (DOM again, XML Schema, XQuery, XPath2). Some of these are more contentious than others, but the point remains that the W3C is an industry consortium and its non-profit status is misleading; its Working Groups aren't exactly evil, but they aren't exactly BSD cathedrals, let alone GNU/Linux bazaars.

Regarding the inclusion of non-W3C standards, I think as you mentioned in your comment about the redirect, the W3C is not the sole producer of specifications for the Web, nor even of specs of particular interest to advocates of the Web standards movement. I had specific standards in mind when listing each organization, and chose my words carefully so as not to imply that all of their publications qualified. For example, aside from the many specs that aren't directly relevant to the creation and use of Web sites, the IETF (and related IANA) is responsible for the HTTP protocol, defines IRI and URI syntax and general semantics, defines specific URI schemes, and names & refines character encodings. A web browser that tries to support HTML <form>s without making an effort to adhere to these specs is going to have a hard time interoperating with code and servers that do. If those specs are not "Web standards", then we need a better definition and a better article title (again, without doing original research).

I think the article still needs a lot more content and explanations, hence it's still a stub. I just wanted to start to steer it away from what I see as a very selective definition of "Web standards". If it were renamed to "Web standards movement" it might make things a little easier, although I'm sure there's a ton of Wikipedians who'd be interested in a more general article (or list) of Web standards. — mjb 03:28, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

I've just rewritten and expanded the intro a bit so that it better reflects what I'm trying to say, and puts things into better context. See what you think. — mjb 23:22, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

I meant to reply much earlier. Sorry. Yeah, the article I intended to start was indeed Web standards movement. I like what you've done with this one—I thought we already had an article on web/internet standards in general, but I haven't been able to find it. I think this page is necessary, and I'll go ahead and start working on a Web standards movement page. - Crenner 19:47, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

The article page should be cross referenced to ......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_standard

Things to consider

I've been thinking about what this article ought to say about web standards. Here are a few things that would be good to discuss but seem to be missing:

• Backward compatibility
• Forward compatibility
• Quirks mode
• Web standards tests like Acid2 and Acid3 and the effectiveness of them - they have not been popular with everyone

The general reasoning behind creation of web standards should also be discussed. It's not for Wikipedia to say whether having web standards is a good idea or not—that's for the reader to judge—but we ought to explain why web standards are an issue in the first place. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 07:18, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

WHATWG

Add WHATWG and its standards? -- Xue Fuqiao 03:39, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

Web platform

I just redirected Open Web here. Web platform should probably also redirect here. I've tagged the articles with the appropriate merge templates. -- C. A. Russell (talk) 06:05, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

Also, I reached out to User:Tantek about documenting the "open web" as a movement here. -- C. A. Russell (talk) 06:06, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

• -1 on these redirects/mergings.
  Summary: I think these mergings are at best premature, and at worst obscuring of important differences in scope.
  Longer: In particular a subset of "Web standards" are themselves a subset of the "Web platform" (not all web standards are relevant to the web platform, the web platform itself could arguably be said to include various common web frameworks which themselves are not standards).
  The web platform is only one aspect of "Open Web", as the ability to publish and read (access) are key (net neutrality for example), as important, aspects as the standards, and the tools themselves that implement them. Better to keep these pages separate IMO, and tag with requests for documenting the distinctions, which can be further discussed per page on each page's Talk page.
  That being said, each phrase or term in and of itself should be subject to its own "notability requirements", references in media (books, news) etc., and if found lacking or insufficient, that may merit a minor mention on another page instead of its own page.
  -- Tantek (talk) 20:40, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

• C. A. Russell, would you be open to unmerging (undoing the redirect) on Open Web, and instead adding perhaps both a "notability" warning template and a "merge" warning template as well so that those discussions can occur separately / openly? Tantek (talk)

Tantek, thanks for the response. If you feel it's best to undo the redirect from Open Web to this article (Web standards), I won't put up any barriers. On the other hand, I'm not going to roll it back myself. IMO, three separate articles for "Web standards", "Open Web", and "Web platform" with significant overlap puts the encyclopedia in a worse state—it's worse for readers and it's worse for other editors.

What I'm considering here is a scenario where an editor is writing some prose and now has to scrutinize each page. They're now blocking on reading each of those three pages, instead of being more productive as an editor.

Consider the editor who casually inserts a link to open web without checking the target. A reader ends up at a page containing half a paragraph and a list in bad prose. It's not terribly helpful to anyone except those already steeped in the industry and familiar with the subject matter. Now consider if the editor had linked to web platform. The reader ends up at a page containing two paragraphs that explain what's here in the "Web standards" article, but terser and fragmented off. Maybe that reader is part of the initiated and thinks, "Oh, crap. There's not much here. I can fill this out," and then they do. Now there are two articles explaining the same thing, but diverging. There's no need for this kind of fragmentation.

Wrt to comment that there are web frameworks that might be considered part of the "Web platform", even though they're not standards, it seems like a dubious claim. Regardless, it would be trivially handled by having the content live at a page titled "Web platform", then, with "Web standards" redirecting there, than vice versa. I don't actually care where this content lives (except I think "Open Web" would be a poor choice); I care only that it's not fragmented into two articles with divergent explanations. It ends up feeling like Alice's GeoCities page explaining what she's learned about writing web pages, and Bob's Angelfire page explaining what he's learned about writing web pages.

Like I alluded to before, if "Open Web" for example is better serviced by an assay dedicated to the contingent who advocates for open standards, against DRM, vendor-neutrality, universal accessibility, etc, then we can do so much better by fleshing out the canonical article (wherever it lives) with an entire section discussing this, and then make Open Web redirect directly to that section. The same is true of the "Web standards" versus "Web platform" schism that now exists. -- C. A. Russell (talk) 17:52, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

PS: none the articles in their original state were overly long. I just want to make a note of this to avoid having to defend against hypotheticals. If we had 5,000 words on the web platform, and 10,000 about web standards, the standardization process, and its history to this point, then of course I'd agree that we should identify common parts and isolate those that best live under one heading or the other. But that's not where we're at. "Web standards" is a deficient article about that subject. "Web platform" is an even more deficient two paragraphs as of this writing. "Open Web", as I mentioned, was half a paragraph and a list. If you consider that due to conceptual duplication the union is less than the sum of all parts, then I think it's clearer to understand where I'm coming from on this. By all means, fill these articles out. But bloated articles is not the problem we're facing right now. -- C. A. Russell (talk) 18:00, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

C. A. Russell, thank *you* for the very thoughtful and thorough response. You make a lot of very good points. Especially your first point of making / editing articles so they can be more easily updated / edited by more editors that happen to come across the article(s). While I still think the distinctions between "Open Web" and "Web Platform" and "Web Standards" are worth documenting, the approach you suggest, with entire sections for each but in a single article, I think makes sense as a good way to move forward, and encourage better explanation of what each means. Also as you point out, the original articles were quite short, and we can iterate their respective sections accordingly, and should they in the future grow to a sufficient size to merit their own articles, we can re-discuss that at the time. Thank you again for taking the time to provide your thinking, and proposed way forward. -- Tantek (talk) 04:45, 17 July 2018 (UTC)