> By the way, I haven't followed this drama in a few years, but taking a look at what's happening now, it looks like the W3C is essentially just plagiarizing the work of the WHATWG.
Ditto, and it's why if anyone asks about HTML and spec. conformance, I don't even mention the W3C, except to dissuade them from paying any attention to them. Their current HTML work is irrelevant and misguided.
My issue here is more with the historical negationism around the relationship between the organisations. The W3C's current HTML is, frankly, wrong-headed. But the context around their current situation is the fact that they've been bullied, cajoled and even somewhat ridiculed reputationally into these quite irrational actions by the WHATWG's very existence. That fact is lost when they're accused of acting negatively toward the WHATWG (e.g. hi-jacking apparent agreements and processes), when the actual background was WHATWG originally hi-jacking the specification of the web's central language.
Your post here is supporting the idea that the W3C's current direction on HTML is irrational. That's fine, I agree. But what they're doing is no worse than what WHATWG did originally with HTML5; the only differentiator is that WHATWG was extremely powerful (being primary implementors) and could use that power to win hearts and minds of pragmatic developers. The W3C have no such power and as such their wrong-headed actions are fruitless. But the equivalence is still worth pointing out.
For anyone confused about how the WHATWG came to write a new HTML spec entirely from scratch, after the W3C blocked the work happening at the W3C, this is a good place to start: http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html#webapps-cdf
I'm going to assume your point that the WHATWG is "extremely powerful" compared to the W3C was meant to be satirical.
Ditto, and it's why if anyone asks about HTML and spec. conformance, I don't even mention the W3C, except to dissuade them from paying any attention to them. Their current HTML work is irrelevant and misguided.
My issue here is more with the historical negationism around the relationship between the organisations. The W3C's current HTML is, frankly, wrong-headed. But the context around their current situation is the fact that they've been bullied, cajoled and even somewhat ridiculed reputationally into these quite irrational actions by the WHATWG's very existence. That fact is lost when they're accused of acting negatively toward the WHATWG (e.g. hi-jacking apparent agreements and processes), when the actual background was WHATWG originally hi-jacking the specification of the web's central language.
Your post here is supporting the idea that the W3C's current direction on HTML is irrational. That's fine, I agree. But what they're doing is no worse than what WHATWG did originally with HTML5; the only differentiator is that WHATWG was extremely powerful (being primary implementors) and could use that power to win hearts and minds of pragmatic developers. The W3C have no such power and as such their wrong-headed actions are fruitless. But the equivalence is still worth pointing out.