I think you have the cart before the horse here. WHATWG is just a codification of what is. If we didn't have WHATWG, you wouldn't be freed from the burden of su

I think you have the cart before the horse here. WHATWG is just a codification of what is. If we didn't have WHATWG, you wouldn't be freed from the burden of supporting current webpages, you just wouldn't know what that burden entails. At any rate, refactoring Blink to meet W3C's spec has to be easier to write a renderer from scratch, even if you don't care about writing noncompliant webpages, or as they're usually known, webpages.