From my experience, it has generally done a better job of explaining things developers would want to know, especially in terms of accessibility and internationalisation.
The XHTML stuff was a long time back, and at that time, it warranted having a whatwg. Now that W3C is no longer insisting on XHTML (and hasn't for many years).
>When it was clear that the WHATWG standard was the one that actually mattered because it was what was actually implemented, the W3C invited them back in to start working on the standard together. That's what HTML5 was; the W3C agreed that they would start from the WHATWG standard, that they could have the same editor (Ian Hickson), and they wound down the XHTML 2.0 group.
This is the crux of it. The WHATWG is really usefull for browser vendors because they can do essentially whatever they want in it without anyone having the power to formally object to it (unlike the W3C). Now the whatwg editors (and thus browser makers) can say that they will listen to community feedback, but thats pretty much a benign dictatorship over the most important spec of the web.
From my experience, it has generally done a better job of explaining things developers would want to know, especially in terms of accessibility and internationalisation.
The XHTML stuff was a long time back, and at that time, it warranted having a whatwg. Now that W3C is no longer insisting on XHTML (and hasn't for many years).
>When it was clear that the WHATWG standard was the one that actually mattered because it was what was actually implemented, the W3C invited them back in to start working on the standard together. That's what HTML5 was; the W3C agreed that they would start from the WHATWG standard, that they could have the same editor (Ian Hickson), and they wound down the XHTML 2.0 group.
This is the crux of it. The WHATWG is really usefull for browser vendors because they can do essentially whatever they want in it without anyone having the power to formally object to it (unlike the W3C). Now the whatwg editors (and thus browser makers) can say that they will listen to community feedback, but thats pretty much a benign dictatorship over the most important spec of the web.