There’s a new thing in the world. Since I got mixed up in the Web a dozen years ago, there’ve always been groups of people trying to standardize HTML (at the IETF, at the W3C, wherever) and as long as I can remember, they’ve been genially ignored, mostly, by browser makers. Maybe no longer; it seems that the WHAT-WG has broken through and been noticed. Mozilla engineer Rob Sayre tells us that WHAT-WG is better than the previous contenders to the HTML-standardization throne, that Firefox has already picked up one piece of their draft-ware, and will be implementing more. Meanwhile, Sam Ruby is doing outstanding work, apparently persuading the WHATters of the virtues keeping what they’re calling “HTML5” somewhat compatible with the rest of the world’s markup.
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From: Ryan King (Dec 04 2006, at 16:51)
"Somewhat compatible" is a bit of a misunderstanding. WHAT-WG is working hard to make HTML5 as compatible as possible with existing deployments of HTML user agents and authoring practices. Sam managed to point out a particular place where WHAT-WG had yet to take into account publishing practice.
To suggest that WHAT-WG isn't building HTML5 with an eye towards backwards compatiblity would be off the mark.
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From: Rob Sayre (Dec 04 2006, at 17:24)
If you look at the charter, you'll see that the WHAT-WG is mostly composed of browser vendors (not all of them, but they've all been invited and continue to be welcome).
Second, the editor has been working on HTML for years. First with Mozilla, then Opera, and now Google. There are some new features being added, but the more important part of the work (imho) is documenting HTML as it exists right now. The research on <a href="http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1161121410&count=1">document.title</a> is instructive. A better title for this fragment might be "Documenting HTML". No Inventions and all that.
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