I'm confused why WHATWG is concerned about W3C plagiarizing their work on an HTML5 spec, when the alternative is competing specs which drift further apart. Surely interoperability is key here?
I'm very much a distant observer here so I might not even know what I'm talking about, but my understanding is that a large part of the problem is that W3C declares a spec as final and stops updating it, while WHATWG is still working on it. So we do end up with competing specs that drift further apart over time. It would be preferable for W3C to just link to the WHATWG docs which are actually maintained.
Exactly. Unfortunately they can't even bring themselves to do this.
See e.g. http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/references.html#refsURL wherein they add in a non-normative note a link to the WHATWG URL spec, but in the normative reference text instead link to an old, outdated working draft from 2012 which specifies an incorrect algorithm and APIs that do not exist in any browser like getParameterNames() and so on.
It's very tragic, and not at all good for the health of the web.
