I think of it like WHATWG is the git master branch of the "html" standard, and W3C regularly packages a modified (changing things they disagree with) version of

I think of it like WHATWG is the git master branch of the "html" standard, and W3C regularly packages a modified (changing things they disagree with) version of it and "release" it with a version number (HTML 5.x), going through alpha, beta, etc. By the time it's finalized, it's out of date.