> Google Chrome doesn't come out until 2008 Oh of course, Google didn't have a horse in the race for the application web at all until 2008. Except wait, they h

> Google Chrome doesn't come out until 2008 Oh of course, Google didn't have a horse in the race for the application web at all until 2008. Except wait, they had released GMail in 2004 and Google Maps in 2005. In fact, WHATWG made frequent references to GMail and Google Maps as examples of the application web and deficiencies that W3C was not addressing in its XHTML standard. Then Ian Hickson, the main editor behind the WHATWG HTML5 standardization process, went to Google. One of my favorite quotes from Hickson about the whole process (as I noted in a sibling comment): "The Web is, and should be, driven by technical merit, not consensus. The W3C pretends otherwise, and wastes a lot of time for it. The WHATWG does not." This says a lot both about the outlook of the WHATWG of the time and the way the development community of the time saw web corporations at the time. And now we have 2 major browsers as of this writing. It's funny how much flak Berners-Lee gets over his acquiescence to DRM and yet the WHATWG discussions of the time are completely glossed over. I was fairly young when the WHATWG and W3C power struggle occurred, but it was a great lesson for me as a teenage programmer in the power of value capture.