Let me clarify some things about the WHATWG HTML Standard: The HTML Standard has not been maintained by Ian since 2015. It has since then been maintained by my

Let me clarify some things about the WHATWG HTML Standard: The HTML Standard has not been maintained by Ian since 2015. It has since then been maintained by myself, Anne, Simon, and Philip. Affiliations during that time are, respectively: Google, Mozilla then Apple, Bocoup then Mozilla, and Google. (Indeed, mostly only browser companies have been paying people to be editors for web specs!) https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/acknowledgements.html#acknowledgments https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/acknowledgements.html... But the contributor pool is much larger. We're quite proud of the vibrant (not stagnant) community we've created, which is continually evolving and improving the spec. Contributions come from all corners; many are from people employed by browser engine companies, but others include students, web developers, consultancies like Igalia and Bocoup which various companies hire to work on web standards, W3C staff and members, representatives from server-side runtimes like Node and Deno, and so on. Some interesting pages to peruse might be https://github.com/whatwg/html/commits/main https://github.com/whatwg/html/commits/main , https://github.com/whatwg/html/graphs/contributors?type=c https://github.com/whatwg/html/graphs/contributors?type=c , and https://blog.whatwg.org/ https://blog.whatwg.org/ . Overall I think it's pretty exciting you can run a successful standards organization like this, getting such high engagement levels despite employing no full-time staff and with operating costs being entirely server bills. Including, no membership fees. Which is perhaps relevant to the OP. https://twitter.com/Hixie/status/1603917371214729216 https://twitter.com/Hixie/status/1603917371214729216 The WHATWG only includes features in our standards which have multi-implementer commitment: https://whatwg.org/working-mode#additions https://whatwg.org/working-mode#additions . This is different than some places where anyone can publish a "standard", even if the target platforms have no intention of implementing it. I don't think this reduces to "merely a memorandum of understanding"; I think it's best when standards reflect reality. Other SDOs can disagree, and that's fine; it's healthy to have a marketplace. As for the scare quotes around "living standard", you might enjoy https://whatwg.org/faq#living-standard https://whatwg.org/faq#living-standard and the follow-up questions.