[johansch]

http://www.cnet.com/au/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups-sti...

""The real problem is of course that the W3C is still copying our work even after we asked them to stop doing that," [Anne] van Kesteren said. It's legal, but "oftentimes it comes pretty close [to] or is actual plagiarism."

It's one of many instances of copying, Hickson said. "For reasons that defy my understanding, the W3C staff refuse to treat the WHATWG as a peer organization" that relies on WHATWG's work, he said. Instead, it creates its own copies of some standards. "They'll eventually say they have a 'final' version, and then they'll stop fixing bugs. It's very sad."

[cwyers]

It's amusing to me to watch the WHATWG people complain about the W3C having the temerity to put out revisions to their own specification, and then complaining about how the W3C is copying their work. Would they rather W3C put out an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT HTML specification from theirs? Would that be better for anyone at all?

[domenicd]

Yes, actually. We'd encourage the HTML working group to do original work. Many W3C working groups do that, e.g. the webapps working group worked on web components and various other specs, and it helps the web platform.

[Tyrannosaurs]

So they should reinvent the wheel when there are good solutions out there?

Isn't the whole point of standards to stop that sort of thing happening?

I get that you may feel that someone is just appropriating your work rather than doing their own but if your aim is to build a standard then reusing things is probably going to be part of doing that.

[domenicd]

No, they shouldn't reinvent the wheel at all. They should reference the WHATWG specs, like they do IETF and Ecma specs.

There's no "reusing" going on here, just plain old copying-and-pasting.

[cwyers]

What makes this really funny for me is that WHATWG fully appropriated the spec that W3C wrote for HTML and the DOM, as well as the names HTML and DOM.

[gsnedders]

The specs were written from scratch, because the W3C holds the copyright on them (the old specs are also of relatively little use). The spec now called HTML5 was officially called Web Applications 1.0 till after the W3C HTML WG was (re-)chartered.

[kijin]

I dunno, perhaps if the W3C and WHATWG produced radically different specifications, one of them would be explicitly rejected by everyone and thus die a clean death. That might be better than having two very similar, equally authoritative, but subtly different specifications, one of which is sort of but not quite a snapshot of the other.

[greyfade]

Equally authoritative? I had no idea WHATWG was drafting specifications, let alone considered authoritative.

[domenicd]

Many of the foundational specifications of the web are authored and maintained by the WHATWG these days: https://spec.whatwg.org/

- DOM, HTML: obvious

- URL, Encoding, Fetch: foundational building blocks

- XHR, Fullscreen, Notifications: important features

There are also other up-and-coming specs like Books, Figures, Streams, or Loader (the latter two not listed).

[edwintorok]

The spec site doesn't load for me on Firefox with RC4 disabled:

  Cannot communicate securely with peer: no common encryption algorithm(s). (Error code: ssl_error_no_cypher_overlap)

[coldtea]

Well, perhaps you haven't kept up then. It's a while since W3C was considered either authoritative or relevant for the modern web.

HTML5 is most all WHATWG.