undefined | Better HN

0 pointsjcranmer9y ago0 comments

WHATWG didn't bully cURL into URL, people complaining that cURL didn't match browsers did that.

The WHATWG made a decision long ago that its standards would be descriptive (describe how people parse it), not prescriptive (describe how people should write it). Anyone who attempted to write a web browser would have had to reverse-engineer how other browsers treated crap, because it was the only way to get websites to work. If you think the definition of URL was stupid, you should see what they had to do to support document.all: define a new concept in JS to represent the notion of "this looks and acts like undefined but you can actually use it as an object."

0 comments

5 comments · 2 top-level

kuschku9y ago· 3 in thread

And a descriptive standard is entirely useless.

The entire point of a standard is that implementors agree on a design definition, then implement it, and it stays consistent, forever.

If you look at standards that work and fail, you’ll quickly notice a pattern. Prescriptive are Metric, the A-series of paper, the entire SI system, most open standards, etc. Descriptive are the imperial / US standard, Letter paper, Microsoft "Open" XML, etc.

And before you complain that prescriptive standards are useless because you can never change legacy systems: Several countries have prescriptive language design, with legal authorities how the language has to be used, and they manage to deal with centuries of legacy data.

jcranmerOP9y ago

The email RFCs are prescriptive, and totally useless. I actually have evidence, for example, that RFC 2047 is more often violated than not, and I wonder if message/global will ever see usage as a Content-Type. Prescriptive attempts at tackling memory models in languages have generally failed.

Also, your delineation of prescriptive/descriptive is laughable. The imperial standard, letter paper, and OOXML are all prescriptive standards (albeit OOXML is a very badly written one). Prescriptive language standards aren't necessarily well-applied--ask how many people follow the 1996 German spelling reform, or how many use «le hashtag» instead of the "official" «le mot-dièse» (hint: look at the name of the Wikipedia page is).

OOXML did poorly not because it was descriptive but because it wasn't precise. It was an XML rendering of internal Office file formats, and its description of terms were no better than internal documentation. Something like the TNEF format is much closer to a descriptive document, since it spends a lot of time discussing the differences between Outlook 2007, Outlook 2010, and Outlook 2013 at various steps.

kuschku9y ago

Considering I’m German, the 1996 spelling reform was exactly what I was referring to – I’ve only found a single document this decade which wasn’t in the new spelling.

All other documents I read have been updated in the meantime.

If an entire country can update centuries of material in a few years, why is it so hard to update some simple websites, or, in case that’s not possible, ship a polyfill as Addon?

1 more reply

germanier9y ago

I know that this is just a minor example, but since 2006 (after a few minor revisions) the new German orthography is pretty widely used, especially by people who's work involves writing.

dragonwriter9y ago

> The WHATWG made a decision long ago that its standards would be descriptive (describe how people parse it), not prescriptive (describe how people should write it)

WhatWG standards are prescriptive in the usual sense; where they differ from other prescriptive approaches is in being grounded in implementation commitments. A standard no one implements is useless, after all.

A standard that is written by a committee where no one is committing to actually implement the standard is useless.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse