I hope this doesn't sound too snarky, but as far as I know, the WHATWG standard is live, consistent and always up to date (including corrections), while the W3C recommendations are outdated snapshots of the WHATWG standard, which are labeled by arbitrary version numbers instead of the snapshot timestamp, for whatever reason.
EDIT: Apparently even that description was too charitable towards the W3C (see gsnedders comments).
They stopped really doing snapshots of the WHATWG standard a while ago when they moved their authoring toolchain away from what the WHATWG document uses, and now just occasionally selectively copy over patches (sometimes incompletely) and make their own changes.
> But is that actually an improvement over the previous situation? (Serious question.)
No, it means we have two increasingly different documents purportedly defining the same things, and when they do copy patches over they've failed to also copy over other dependent patches too on a number of occasions leaving their spec as defined unimplementable.
I know the current manglement isn't explicitly malicious, but this is an atrocious state of affairs.
Practically speaking, the Web is a consortium of corporate foghorns that also happen to collectively be the majority ad-hoc directors of new media (translation: agendas with finance). Cable and daytime TV was the old media, which of course still exists, and social media has become a juggernaut majority of its own beside that.
So, you'd think the actual grassroots on-the-ground parts of a project that is ostensibly defined to be open and free, would actually be made of extremely smart people with straightforward management and as little bureaucracy as possible. Because, you know, the part where everything hits the ground needs to be well-oiled, have no chinks in the armor, and provide a secure foundation of independence.
And yet we have... chaos, infighting, politics and wars over (literally) nothing. And while all that's happening, corporations are progressively nibbling away at the capabilities we have today (to set up websites, to communicate freely) that we take for granted. One day we'll wake up checkmated by some incredibly well-engineered chess move...
Sighs
If the net neutrality thing is repealed, I will be exactly 0% surprised. It'll just be another EME, really.
At this point both W3C and WHATWG are not where innovation on the web is (or should be) happening. It's up to the individual browser makers to innovate. W3C and WHATWG's job should be to document any consensus among browser makers.
It shouldn't be their job to decide how browsers should work, that's the browser makers' decision. (Which happens to be large corporations, for the most part.)
That just gets the browser makers castigated by the tech community. Every time, say.. Google, intents something new, the entirely predictable incoherent screaming starts about how it's another Microsoft IE/ActiveX.
Nevermind the fact that the landscape has changed to the point where that isn't a realistic outcome anymore.
Nevermind the fact that in the instance I'm describing (which was something like WebASM or WebSockets.. it was WebSomething and I can't recall the name), they had submitted their proposals to the standardization groups, with no change on the volume of the noises.
I wish people would decide whether they want browser makers trying New Stuff or they want New Stuff coming from standards bodies only. There are upsides and downsides to either way, but I really don't beleive that BMing browser makers whenever they try New Stuff is even sort of constructive.
> It's up to the individual browser makers to innovate.
This seems to make the most sense because the browser is the end product by which people consume their internet.
It seems to me, they have been and always will be years ahead of the governing bodies that make these part of their "standards" decisions. By the time something finally makes into the spec, we're already onto a dozen new things the browsers are capable of and implementing.
At this point it just feels like the spec is an afterthought, not necessarily keeping up with how fast the industry is changing.
EDIT: Apparently even that description was too charitable towards the W3C (see gsnedders comments).