The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) today signed an agreement to work together on the development of a single version of the HTML and DOM specifications.
This agreement comes seven years after the two groups finalized a split on the development of HTML5 specifications in 2012.
The W3C was founded in 1994 at the MIT/LCS (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science) and is the primary international standards organization for the World Wide Web. And the WHATWG was a formed a decade later in response to the slow development of W3C web standards and because of W3C’s decision to deprecate HTML in favor of XHTML.
For nearly three years after the formation of WHATWG, the two groups paid no attention to one another. WHATWG was busy with the specifications for what is now known as HTML5. And W3C was busy with version 2.0 of XHTML standards. WHATWG’s work picked up speed early on up while W3C’s XHTML 2.0 standards remained incomplete.
Then, in October of 2006, the W3C announced that it would work together with the WHATWG to evolve HTML. And that’s how HTML5 was born.
Three years later, in 2009, the W3C shut down the XHTML 2 Working Group. And three years after that, in 2012, the W3C and the WHATWG decided to split editing duties on their respective HTML5 specifications.
And today, in 2019, the groups have decided to bury the hatchet and work together on the advancement of the world wide web. The groups decided that having two versions of HTML and DOM specifications is harmful for the community. So they’ll now work together on a single version of the specifications.
Moving forward, the W3C will only publish recommendations for WHATWG’s HTML and DOM Living Standards and will not independently publish its own HTML and DOM standards. And the WHATWG will continue to maintain the HTML and DOM Living Standards.
