>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.
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?
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.)
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.
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/