Advancing HTML is indeed something that the w3c members aren't super interested in. There are a few reasons for this: 1) Changes to HTML can create security is

Advancing HTML is indeed something that the w3c members aren't super interested in. There are a few reasons for this: 1) Changes to HTML can create security issues, especially if it results in a change to the HTML parser. You have to consider that non-browser use cases still need to be able to parse HTML correctly. Since we opted to make HTML versionless with <!doctype html> it became harder to do. 2) Big changes are harder to get consensus on. This is one of the reasons why they opt to do smaller, less controversial changes. 3) w3c and whatwg are dominated by large corporations, who hire thousands of engineers to work on their web properties. They are able to overcome the shortcomings of HTML easier than small teams and single-developer websites. I agree though, this is a major problem. HTML is essentially a dead language, no major changes have been made in almost a decade.