I am aware of the history of WHATWG and you are right that its beginning was largely a reaction to the intransigence of W3C at the time. However, the current re

I am aware of the history of WHATWG and you are right that its beginning was largely a reaction to the intransigence of W3C at the time. However, the current relationship is a healthy and collaborative one (I would certainly wouldn't describe it as fragile any more). I would have been remiss not to at least mention the WHATWG, but the footnote is already too long-winded and giving a complete history of the Web was not my purpose (others have done that better). There are many historical events that I painfully chose to omit because while they are personally important to me, they didn't actually add to the purpose of the post. -- I personally wish that there was a different term than "HTML5" to refer to the additional work happening around and on the W3C HTML5 foundation. But, unfortunately there is no replacement term that quite captures the full scope of what most people mean when they use the term "HTML5". I share your distaste: it has a version number in it for crying out loud, it can't refer to something vague! I considered trying to use my post to promote "HTML5+" or something similar so I would not contribute to the corruption of "HTML5". But I decided that was the impossible fight the popular usage and chose to instead pick a new term for the narrow reference "W3C HTML5".