

WHATWG is going back to W3C as a Community Group - jacoblyles
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Apr/0210.html

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atdt
This is excellent news. WHATWG has been a dynamo for shiny things, and they
deserve praise for transforming front-end development into a hugely exciting
technological frontier. (Let's track popular usage and call that
transformation 'HTML5', even though it's a misnomer.)

But there have been reasons to worry, too. Although anyone can participate in
the mailing lists, where the meat-and-potatoes of standards development
happens, full membership is by invitation only, and has not been expanded
beyond the major browser vendors. This fact, coupled with the lack of of a
serious effort to drive community involvement (IMHO), has distorted the
conversation, skewing it in the direction of technical solutions that are
implementable in browser code and that are useful primarily for developers
working on enterprise-class web apps like gmail.

The good news is that this work made front-end development the most exciting
place to be. Getting RIAs to work well at scale requires considerable
expertise and ingenuity.

The bad news is that the web browser that you are using has been augmented
with a slew of new APIs, many of which have only seen very limited adoption
outside major browser vendors. It'll be a while before we can appreciate their
full impact on the character of content on the web, and by that point the
specs will be a fait accompli.

The W3C struck me as considerable more idealistic, with a louder, more
explicit commitment to making the web serve truly human ends. I'm sure this
makes them a lot less efficient than they'd otherwise be. But when you're
steering the development of a platform that binds ever larges swathes of
humanity together on a planetary scale, there are things other than efficiency
or innovation to optimize for.

