> specs are not laws until they're candidate recommendations To be pedantic; web specs are (almost) never laws (occasionally some specs for e.g. a11y are incor

> specs are not laws until they're candidate recommendations To be pedantic; web specs are (almost) never laws (occasionally some specs for e.g. a11y are incorporated by reference into other laws, but that typically doesn't affect implementors). This is more important than it sounds because people are occasionally confused into thinking that if they can get something written down in a spec and drive the spec through the W3C process people will somehow be forced to implement it. Even for specs that are implemented, the phases of the W3C process are actually mostly meaningless formalisms, and other bodies (e.g. WHATWG) work well without them. In practice a spec becomes "law" — i.e. immune from backwards incompatible changes — when there is enough content that depends on the existing behaviour that vendors won't unship it. For most cases this is more or less when there are two compatible implementations shipping, although of course the details very on a case-by-case basis.