[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.