Anne van Kesteren

W3C forks HTML yet again

The W3C has forked the HTML Standard for the nth time. As always, it is pretty disastrous:

• Erased all Git history of the document.
• Did not document how they transformed the document. Issues of mismatches have already been reported and it will likely be a long time, if ever, before all bugs due to this process are uncovered, since it was not open.
• Did not discuss plans with the wider community.
• Did not discuss plans with the folks they were forking from.
• Did not even discuss plans with the members of the W3C Web Platform Working Group.
• Erased the acknowledgments section.
• Erased the copyright and licensing information and replaced it with their own.

So far this fork has been soundly ignored by the HTML community, which is as expected and desired. We hesitated to post this since we did not want to bring undeserved attention to the fork. But we wanted to make the situation clear to the web standards community, which might otherwise be getting the wrong message. Thus, proceed as before: the standards with green stylesheets are the up-to-date ones that should be used by implementers and developers, and referred to by other standards. They are where work on crucial bugfixes such as setting the correct flags for <img> fetches and exciting new features such as <script type=module> will take place.

If there are blockers preventing your organization from working with the WHATWG, feel free to reach out to us for help in resolving the matter. Deficient forks are not the answer.

— The editors of the HTML Standard