W3C or WHATWG these days. One browser tries something and then another one decides to implement it, and someone writes up a spec. The DOM APIs grew slowly most

W3C or WHATWG these days. One browser tries something and then another one decides to implement it, and someone writes up a spec. The DOM APIs grew slowly mostly because of the general stagnation in the browser market, but they have been a long-lived, relatively successful API on which popular things like jQuery (or its competitors) could be based.