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WHATWG

Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group is a community of people interested in evolving HTML and related technologies. The WHATWG was founded by individuals from Apple, Mozilla and Opera.

Specificatons​

  • HTML Living Standard
    • Core markup language (HTML)
    • Numerous APIs like WebSocket, web browser, web storage, etc...
  • DOM Standard
  • Fetch Standard
    • Requests, Responses and the process that binds them: Fetching.
    • JavaScript "fetch" API
    • Supersedes HTML5 fetch functionality, CORS and HTTP Origin Header semantics.
  • Streams Standard
    • APIs for creating, composing and consuming streams of data, designed to map efficiently to low-level I/O primitives, and allow easy composition with built-in backpressure and queueing.
    • On top of streams, web platform can build higher-level abstractions, such as Filesystem or Socket APIs.
  • MIME Type Sniffing
    • How MIME types are supposed to be sniffed in web browsers.
  • URL Standard
    • Defines how URLs are supposed to be parsed in web browsers.

History​

It was formed in response to the slow development of W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) web standards and W3C's decision to abandon HTML in favor of XML-based technologies.

On 2007, the new HTML working group of W3C adopted the WHATWG's HTML5 standard. Since them, W3C and WHATWG have been developing HTML independently, at times causing specificatons to diverge.

In 2017, WHATWG established an intellectual property rights agreement that includes a patent policy.

In 2019, the W3C and WHATWG agreed to a memorandum of understanding where development of HTML and DOM speciications would be done principally in the WHATWG. This also stablishes that WHATWG would be the sole publisher of the HTML and DOM standards, stoping the publishing competing standards since 2012.