[gmfawcett]

What is the relationship between W3C and WHATWG these days? I haven't been following that story for years now -- at the time it seemed that W3C was losing relevance, and that WHATWG was becoming the de facto standards keeper for web tech.

[user3939382]

There's a very interesting long-form (somewhat chronologically organized) answer to your question from the horse's mouth here https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/W3C

[judge2020]

Seems their mediawiki is struggling, here's an archive https://web.archive.org/web/20210815185631/https://wiki.what...

[assemblylang]

>What is the relationship between W3C and WHATWG these days?

IIRC a few years ago W3C essentially handed over web standards to WHATWG, with the thinking being that it wasn't helpful to have 2 competing standards.

[tannhaeuser]

W3C had released redacted snapshots (HTML 5, 5.1, and 5.2) of WHATWG's so-called "living standard", then published HTML 5.3 as a reference to a specific WHATWG commit and for a short time promised more supposedly at least qa'd snapshots, then last year finally gave up and just linked to WHATWG's head [1]. SVG2 didn't go anywhere either due to lack of interest of "browser vendors". MathML hasn't been updated in many years AFAIK. So that leaves ARIA and CSS.

Whatever W3C does and with due respect to TBL, as a self-proclaimed standardization body they've failed spectacularly to keep "browsers vendors" at bay and the web from being monopolized, and I think they should disband, if only to demonstrate to the world that the web isn't "standardized" in any meaningful sense of that word. Even HNers frequently have illusions about "web standards".

While on the way out, they might attempt to deliver CSS specs actually useful for developing browsers. Or maybe they want to venture into developing a browser themselves using their funds?

[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/2021/NOTE-html53-20210128/

[rpastuszak]

Since the web standards are owned by WHATWG, any idea what the purpose of W3C is nowadays?

[Macha]

CSS, XML, SVG are still W3C standards

[doublerabbit]

Somehow I've not herd of WHATWG and according to the wiki article the active memberships are: Apple, Google, Microsoft and supposedly Mozilla?

The three largest tech companies own the internet standards? That's quite unsettling.

[mminer237]

Regardless of who participates in drafting standards, those five control the de facto standards anyway as they make the five largest browsers.

[pdw]

XML and everything that's build on it

[ryukafalz]

I know they do standards work on top of web protocols these days. Those digital vaccination records were based on W3C’s Verifiable Credentials standard. (The US ones anyway; I’m not sure about those used elsewhere in the world.)

[robin_reala]

Just HTML, not anything else.

[Macha]

Note however that HTTP is a IETF standard, Javascript is an ECMA standard, so of the core web components, CSS is the last they control.

[robin_reala]

Right, but that’s not the only thing they do that’s used on the web. They also own and run XML, security specs like CSP and SRI, the WCAG accessibility guidelines, Web Payments, WebAuth, WebRTC, etc etc.

They also do non-web stuff that happens to use web standards, for example ePub3.

[frivoal]

Depending on what you consider core: also SVG, WebRTC, ServiceWorkers, Aria, Web Payments, WOFF, Web Audio…