W3C and WHATWG agree to develop common HTML and DOM specifications

W3C and WHATWG organizations have signed agreement on further joint development of the HTML and DOM specifications. The signing of the agreement summed up the process of rapprochement W3C и WHATWG, launched in December 2017 after the WHATWG introduced some common work processes and approved common rules regarding intellectual property.

A new working group has been created in the W3C to organize joint work on specifications HTML Working Group, which will be responsible for translating the draft HTML and DOM specifications developed in WHATWG into the form of 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 specifications HTML и SUN, it is recommended to submit directly to the WHATWG repository.

Basic agreements between W3C and WHATWG:

• The organizations will work together on HTML and DOM specifications. Development will be carried out in the WHATWG repositories, in which a continuously developed current version of the specifications will continue to be formed, on the basis of which draft sections will branch off for separate review and standardization;
• WHATWG will maintain continuously evolving specifications HTML и SUN (Living Standard);
• The W3C will stop independently publishing its own draft HTML and DOM specifications, and will use the WHATWG work as drafts for preparing and discussing standards;
• W3C transfers all processes associated with submitting changes, reporting problems, writing tests and developing solutions to resolve problems to the WHATWG repositories and recommends their use.
• WHATWG will perform the work of periodically generating Review Drafts. The W3C will use these drafts as candidates for standardization (Candidate Recommendations), for which regular W3C processes will be used to bring the drafts into the form of a preliminary and final standard. The W3C organization will no longer be directly involved in the creation and discussion of drafts;
• Section /TR on the W3C site (all standards and drafts) for HTML and DOM related documents will link to the site WHATWG;
• In case of disagreement with any decisions of one of the parties, a conflict resolution process is 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 is not found, either party remains entitled to terminate the agreement;
• Adoption of uniform rules in the field of copyright and brands;
• Whatwg.org introduces different formatting to W3C standards;
• To document W3C Normative Reference Policy Changes have been made to allow references to the stable capabilities of the continuously evolving WHATWG (Living Standards) specifications.

Until now, different versions of the HTML and DOM specifications have developed in parallel - one version was standardized by the W3C organization, and the second was developed within the framework of continuous cycle developed by the WHATWG organization, which initially oversaw the creation of HTML 5. Synchronizing the two versions required a lot of effort and led to ambiguities (W3C standardization took a long time and meant testing drafts with a separate analysis of wishes and corrections for them, which were not reflected in the WHATWG specifications that went into this time forward). Seven years ago even was not excluded the possibility of a split that could lead to the development of two independent HTML5 standards.

Let us recall that the organization WHATWG (The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) was founded in 2004 with the goal of accelerating the continued development of the HTML language and program interfaces for the formation of web applications. The founders of WHATWG were Apple, Mozilla and Opera, who disagreed with the policies of the standardizing organization W3C, which believed that the future belonged to the XML and XHTML specifications, and, contrary to the wishes of web developers, perceived HTML as a dying technology. In contrast to the lengthy standardization process practiced by the W3C, which includes preliminary testing of draft versions and holding their public discussions, the WHATWG for the development of HTML5 used a model for updating specifications in a continuous cycle, without explicit fixation of versions, with progressive changes and constant support in an up-to-date form.

Source: opennet.ru