The WHATWG W3C kerfuffle perfectly illustrates that when an unaccountable body's decisions become unpopular, another body can meet popular demands and sidestep

The WHATWG W3C kerfuffle perfectly illustrates that when an unaccountable body's decisions become unpopular, another body can meet popular demands and sidestep the body's work. W3C was not taking HTML, XML, and XHTML in the directions that most users of the Web wanted. The fact that semantic web fans and the web-should-be-for-documents crowd agreed with the W3C doesn't matter, they were outnumbered by the rest. WHATWG met the demands of other devs and pushed the W3C into irrelevance. Sometimes it takes more than feeling right to be right, you need to convince others also.