> The WHATWG spec is worse than useless to me as a developer. It's impossible to tell what is usable and what is just Google's wishlist (which is about half of it). The MDN has entirely replaced it for me, since they at least do a good job of documenting reality.
The WHATWG living standard is largely where browser vendors (and other interested parties) work out what the web will be. W3C (with their implementation requirement), and, as you note, MDN serve to describe what the Web is. The latter is more useful to developers, but, as you suggest, MDN is doing a better job of it.
OTOH, to get to a place where things have interoperable implementations, a forum for implementors to collaborate on forward-lookong specifications is necessary, and that’s what WHATWG does well, and W3C does not (which is why WHATWG exists.)
I agree with everything you said. What rubs me the wrong way about the WHATWG is that they give the perception (and it may be just that) that they are trying not just to serve as that forum for browser makers, but also as the standard reference for web developers (which is the role the W3C HTML specs, save XHTML 2, have historically served), and doing a poor job of the latter.
I don't think the WHATWG is trying to serve as the reference for web developers (though their HTML spec has notable and laudable features for that use); I think they are mostly fine with W3C trying to do that as long as they do it correctly (which requires alignment with what browsers do, otherwise developers will target a non-existent platform.)
I don't know if they (or developers, MDN is probably a more widely used reference than W3C) see a standards body as essential in that role, though, and I don't think it seems W3C really wants to accept being relegated to that role rather than driving the web platform, even though they haven't driven the platform for a long time.
I'm not sure the intent of your comment; failure to track what browsers actually do is exactly the problem with the WHATWG "living standard" – it's very much a forward-looking spec at best, and too often a wishlist.
The ideal situation is for the WHATWG document to be a roadmap of what vendors have discussed and tentatively agreed on, and the W3C document to be a periodic snapshot of what's actually been implemented.
That wouldn't make either one of them "bad". The issue here seems to be W3C wanting to push forward things that the vendors haven't agreed on or implemented yet.
I don't think the W3C DOM document has anything the developers haven't agreed to. The problem is that it's an incomplete, intrinsically out of date, and often buggy subset of the the WHATWG living standard.
I agree that the W3C value proposition COULD be to publish a snapshot that describes what's actually implemnted. That might be a way forward here, but it requires a lot of work to define what "actually implemented" means in a useful way, and to check the test results and update the document (or build an automated way to harvest resources such as https://wpt.fyi/dom ).
Great, so if I build a website based purely on the WHATWG specs, it will work in all browsers, correctly?
No, it won't.
I can take the A4 paper spec and build a printer that takes that paper, and I know paper will comply with it. And the other way around.
You can't build a website just from WHATWG specs, and you can't, excluding the parts about backwards compatible parsing, easily build a new browser from scratch either.
A standard is an a-priori written document that describes the entire API surface, so that people on both sides can develop based on the standard without having to verify with actual implementations.
The WHATWG documents are useless for this purpose.
But how are the W3C specs any better than the WHATWG specs?
As far as I know the W3C take the WHATWG specs, and modify them with some of their own ideas so they're different from the what the browsers implement or are planning to implement.
What on earth is the point of that? Why design your own spec that nobody is implementing or planning to implement? What a waste of time!
And back to your point - why is it better than the WHATWG specs?
The WHATWG living standard is largely where browser vendors (and other interested parties) work out what the web will be. W3C (with their implementation requirement), and, as you note, MDN serve to describe what the Web is. The latter is more useful to developers, but, as you suggest, MDN is doing a better job of it.
OTOH, to get to a place where things have interoperable implementations, a forum for implementors to collaborate on forward-lookong specifications is necessary, and that’s what WHATWG does well, and W3C does not (which is why WHATWG exists.)