3 ms·

Sounds like a recognition of WHATWG as the master, with W3C becoming more of a publishing / vetting organization for snapshots of the standard?

• tannhaeuser 7y ago
  I guess it's more a recognition of the limited resources of both W3C and WHATWG, of the fact that there's a need for a "real" fixed-in-time and versioned document describing HTML rather than a collaboration workspace (WHATWG's "living standard") and W3C's choice to not die on the particular hill of redacting WHATWG texts. Though practically speaking, W3C HTML 5.2 (the last completed recommendation) was sponsored by The Paciello Group and MS before that, and with MS' withdrawal from browser development they also gave up redacting W3C HTML to fit IE's features set. I would love to be corrected by an insider, but that's what I could make up from publically available info.
  • gsnedders 7y ago
    As far as I'm aware, MS continued to be involved with the W3C HTML much longer than other browsers due to the W3C patent policy, which the WHATWG only had any equivalent of as of December 2017. Note also the W3C specs weren't really redacted versions of the WHATWG spec, especially in later years: they were pretty much complete forks and moving changes between them non-trivial.
• Angostura 7y ago
  Or it could be a relationship similar to that between the IAB and IETF
• sjwright 7y ago
  When in reality the actual implementations are the master, WHATWG are the first to describe the implementations' intended behaviors, and W3C is a glorified proxy server with aggressive caching.