In case you're wondering, the HTML WG charter hasn't been extended beyond December, 6th. There hadn't been any public activity for about two years anyway and W3C had undergone major changes meanwhile, such as a change in financing and legal entity type.<p>Worth noting is that privacy concerns related to the reporting and other APIs were what was preventing the last considered WHATWG HTML Review Draft (published January, 2022) to become a recommendation, and change in HTML's so-called outlining (a holdout of Ian Hickson's vision for HTML that was never implemented in browsers and accessibility tech). Even though Steve Faulkner took it upon himself to remove outlining in upstream WHATWG specs, now no W3C recommendation is representing a modern HTML language without outlining. [1] makes the point that, arguably, its removal would've warranted a major version bump ("HTML 6") anyway, considering outlining has been formally part of "HTML 5" for the longest time.<p>[1]: <a href="https://sgmljs.net/blog/blog2303.html" rel="nofollow">https://sgmljs.net/blog/blog2303.html</a>
Once web development moved to the WHATWG, it's not obvious what continued relevance W3C had. Nobody was particularly waiting on their blessing or rubber stamp.<p>The W3C was not, for instance, a useful bastion against things like DRM, because they approved the EME DRM mechanism. And they weren't doing new web innovation that people wanted. So what purpose did they serve?
This is a capstone of sorts to a process begun by the W3C's XHTML focus 20 years ago. Once again, incremental improvements to a flawed technology (HTML) were more successful than a perfectionist rewrite (XHTML). We so often ignore or downplay costs associated with adoption and migration when we build our "castles in the air".<p>> The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (Fred Brooks)<p>The W3C HTML working group was even further removed from users, imagining castles but then delegating the building to others.
I remember they re-launched as a public-interest non-profit organization. [1] And then that was it. It doesn't seems the WHATWG were interested to play along.<p>Practically speaking the internet is now Webkit or Blink. With a pitch of Gecko added.<p>Nearly 25 years after IE 5.5, I do sometimes feel the Web hasn't actually moved or improved as much as we thought it would.<p>RIP W3C.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34595456">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34595456</a>