WHATWG

The WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) is the standards body that maintains the HTML Living Standard and the DOM standard. It was founded on 4 June 2004 by representatives of Apple, Mozilla, and Opera after a joint position paper proposing pragmatic extensions to HTML was voted down at a W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents two days earlier. The founding announcement was posted to an open mailing list by Ian Hickson, who became the long-running editor of the HTML specification. The group formed in response to two concerns about the W3C's direction. First, the W3C had refocused on XML-based successors to HTML — notably XHTML 2.0 — that explicitly abandoned backwards compatibility. Second, the W3C process was perceived as slow and disconnected from the practical needs of browser implementers, who were trying to ship applications-grade features like richer form controls, offline storage, and canvas drawing. WHATWG operates on a small number of explicit principles. Specifications must be backwards compatible. Specifications must be detailed enough that independent implementations behave identically, including for malformed input, which means error recovery is specified rather than left to chance. When the spec and shipping implementations disagree, the spec is normally what changes. New features are added continuously rather than batched into versioned releases — the Living Standard model. The group's early work, Web Forms 2.0 and Web Applications 1.0, was renamed HTML5 and adopted by the W3C as the starting point of its own HTML working group in May 2007. The two bodies published parallel specifications for over a decade with growing divergence in philosophy. In May 2019 the W3C and WHATWG signed a memorandum recognizing WHATWG as the sole publisher of HTML and DOM. Governance now sits with a Steering Group composed of Apple, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft.