WHATWG standards don’t even deserve that name. A standard is something like ISO EN DIN A4. It is defined in cooperation with every stakeholder involved, it is

WHATWG standards don’t even deserve that name. A standard is something like ISO EN DIN A4. It is defined in cooperation with every stakeholder involved, it is specced, it is tested, and a stable definition is created. Everyone builds against this definition, and it works fine. The standard deprecates everything that existed before, and replaces it. That is a standard. It’s authoritative, basically immutable, and it is prescriptive. WHATWG "standards" come after the fact, only consider whatever browsers implement, refuse to ever deprecate anything (unless browsers have already deprecated it), and almost always just are "whatever Google Chrome does". That’s a disgusting abuse of the word standard. WHATWG "standards" are the equivalent of Microsoft Office Open XML, a standards body just taking an existing implementation, defining whatever it does as standard, and doing it so incomplete that the result is useless. Yes, WHATWG and W3C are doing the best they can do in the current climate (where Google can roll out QUIC and SPDY before even any standard is defined across websites accounting for 6% of global traffic, 65%+ of web browsers, and 85%+ of mobile phones), but this is just misleading. It helps no one to pretend to do standardization work when you don’t actually have any power to decide anything – neither WHATWG nor W3C can actually force, or even ask, Google to change SPDY or QUIC. They’re papertigers.