There was a ton of work across browser vendors to make this a part of spec: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/canvas.html#the-canvas-element https://html.

There was a ton of work across browser vendors to make this a part of spec: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/canvas.html#the-canvas-element https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/canvas.html#the-canva... It's all there. It's all official. That github page was just one part of reaching consensus. There's also TAG review: https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/627 https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/627 FWIW Mozilla and Safari signed off on all of these changes at some point in time somewhere, hence why it's allowed to be part of spec. There were some changes that were not allowed to be part of the new API because one of those two said no (like perspective transforms, conic curves). For jdashg's concerns on that thread, 4x4 matrices were cancelled, and you can follow up with much more debate from all parties on roundRect and filters: http://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/6763 http://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/6763 https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/6765 https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/6765 This is certainly not decided by fiat. Working to find consensus across browser implementers is just a ton of work.