The W3C and WHATWG organizations an agreement for the continued joint development of HTML and DOM specifications. The signing of the agreement concluded the process of convergence and , initiated in December 2017 after the adoption of some shared workflows and the establishment of unified intellectual property rules in WHATWG.
To facilitate collaboration on the specifications, a new working group has been created within W3C, , which will be responsible for translating the drafts of HTML and DOM specifications developed in WHATWG into W3C recommendations (standards), taking into account the wishes of the community, including users, browser manufacturers, and web developers. All changes and new features related to the specifications and , are recommended to be directed directly to the WHATWG repositories.
The key agreements between W3C and WHATWG are:
- The organizations will work together on the HTML and DOM specifications. Development will take place in WHATWG repositories, where a continuously evolving current version of the specifications will continue to be formed, based on which draft slices for separate review and standardization will branch off;
- WHATWG will be responsible for maintaining the continuously evolving specifications and (Living Standard);
- W3C will cease independent publication of its own preliminary HTML and DOM specifications and will use WHATWG's drafts for preparing and discussing standards;
- All processes related to the transfer of changes, reporting issues, writing tests, and developing solutions to problems will be moved to WHATWG repositories, and their use will be recommended.
- WHATWG will carry out the work of periodically producing draft specifications (Review Drafts). These drafts will be used by W3C as candidates for standardization (Candidate Recommendations), for which standard W3C processes will be applied to bring the drafts into preliminary and final standard form. W3C will no longer be directly involved in the creation and discussion of drafts;
- Partition on the W3C site (all standards and drafts) for documents related to HTML and DOM will link to the site ;
- In case of disagreement with any decisions made by either party, a conflict resolution process will be introduced, which involves escalating the discussion to the level of the WHATWG Steering Group, W3C Technical Architecture Group, and the W3C Director. If a compromise cannot be found, either party retains the right to terminate the agreement;
- Adoption of unified rules regarding copyright and branding;
- Different formatting for W3C standards is introduced on whatwg.org;
- In the document amendments have been made to allow references to stable features of continuously evolving WHATWG specifications (Living Standards).
Until now, different versions of HTML and DOM specifications have developed in parallel — one version was standardized by W3C, while the other was developed within of development by WHATWG, which initially oversaw the creation of HTML5. Synchronizing the two versions required significant effort and led to ambiguities (W3C standardization took a long time and involved testing drafts with a separate review of requests and corrections, which were not reflected in the WHATWG specifications that advance during this time). Seven years ago, even which could have led to the development of two independent HTML5 standards.
It is worth noting that the WHATWG (The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) was founded in 2004 to accelerate the ongoing development of the HTML language and application programming interfaces for building web applications. The founding members of WHATWG included companies Apple, Mozilla, and Opera, who disagreed with the standardization organization's W3C policy, believing that the future lay with XML and XHTML specifications, and contrary to the wishes of web developers, viewed HTML as an outdated technology. Unlike the lengthy standardization process practiced by W3C, which included preliminary testing of draft versions and public discussions, WHATWG applied a model of continuous specification updates for the development of HTML5, without explicit version fixing, with incremental changes and ongoing support in current form.
Source: opennet.ru
