2 Chapter 1—Overview of the New Web Standard
HTML4 six years before and had instead elected to back XHTML, XForms, SVG,
and SMIL, it was hardly surprising that this suggestion was rejected. The re-
sult was very close, with 8 votes in favor and 11 votes against, but the decision
still had far-reaching consequences. In the following years, the development of
HTML5 was to take place in direct competition with the W3C.
Ian Hickson, who at the time supported the position paper, together with the
second Opera representative Håkon Wium Lie and Mozilla’s David Baron, re-
viewed the events in his web log and came to the conclusion:The issues have been discussed, the positions have been given, everyone
knows where everyone else stands, now it’s time to get down and actually
start doing work.Referring to recent events, he finishes with these words:What working group is going to work on extending HTML...He is referring to the Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group
(WHATWG), which was created on June 4, 2004, just two days after the end of
the workshop. The WHATWG describes itself as a loose, unofficial, and open col-
laboration of the browser manufacturers Safari, Opera, and Mozilla, as well as
interested parties. Its aim is to continue development of the HTML standard
and to submit the results of this process to a standards organization to achieve
standardization.
The founding members of the WHATWG include Anne van Kesteren, Brendan
Eich, David Baron, David Hyatt, Dean Edwards, Håkon Wium Lie, Ian Hickson,
Johnny Stenbäck, and Maciej Stachowiak. This select circle of developers from
the browser and HTML community was to shape the fate of HTML5 from then
on, together with the active WHATWG community.
Three specifications were initially on the agenda of Ian Hickson, who took on a
central role as editor: Web Forms 2.0 as advancement of HTML forms; Web Apps
1.0, which focused on application development within HTML; and Web Controls
1.0, a specification centered around interactive widgets. The latter project was
soon abandoned, and Web Forms was integrated into Web Apps at a later time.
The working method of the WHATWG has always been geared toward collabora-
tion with the community; if you look at the homepage (see Figure 1.1), you can
see this very clearly.