[whatwg] Technical Parity with W3C HTML Spec

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 7:31 PM, Ashley Sheridan
<ash at ashleysheridan.co.uk> wrote:
> If we all subscribed to that point of view though, everyone would still be stuck using IE5. As it is, there's a push by developers to use features that IE has always been slow to implement but other browsers have, and IE being the most popular browser is a pretty major player. Just because they've refused to support things countless times hasn't stopped the progression of standards; standards that other browsers adhere to for the most part.

The idea that the spec has to reflect what browsers will implement is
not an ironclad rule.  It's purely pragmatic.  Right now, all browsers
mostly agree on what they want to see implemented, so it works.  If
things were different, the rule would have to be altered or discarded.
 If one particular vendor acted in bad faith and refused to implement
the specs, then the WHATWG could continue to coordinate between all
the rest of the vendors.  Thankfully, this doesn't seem likely anytime
soon.

For instance, Microsoft didn't participate in the early days of HTML5
development at all, so it was just ignored.  The WHATWG coordinated
between the other browser vendors, and Microsoft had no say.  As soon
as Microsoft expressed willingness to implement HTML5, its feedback
resulted in changes just like any other vendor (<bb>, <keygen>, ...).
This is a clear demonstration that the WHATWG's practices would *not*
lead to everyone sticking with IE: the WHATWG was busy speccing things
in the IE6 days, although Microsoft expressed zero interest.

On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 3:05 AM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke at gmx.de> wrote:
> Out of curiosity: why do we care about 1%? Who decided where we draw the
> line?

I don't think there's a hard line.  I don't know what would happen if
everyone supported a feature except Opera -- it's never come up.