> WHATWG was created specifically because W3C wasn’t really listening to web authors though.
Rather: WHATWG was founded because the companies developing browsers (in particular Google) believed that what the W3C was working on for XHTML 2.0 was too academic, and went into a different direction than their (i.e. in particular Google's) vision for the web.
They only paid the salary of its chief editor (Ian Hickson) for a significant amount of time...
But that's not very relevant actually. The WHATWG is more like a private arbitrator, not like a court or parliament.
Their mission is to document browser features and coordinate them in such a way that implementation between browsers doesn't diverge too much. It's NOT their mission to decide which features will or will not be implemented or even to design new features. That's left to the browser vendors.
This is such a bizarre response to me saying Google was not part of the founding WHATWG group. It’s like you want to have an argument but don’t have anything to argue about.
“Oh, yeah? Well they paid Hickson’s salary. And the WHATWG doesn’t matter anyway. And also Google is really powerful.”
Um, ok.
WHATWG was founded in 2004 by Mozilla, Opera, and Apple. Google had no browser at that point and didn’t hire Ian Hickson until 2005.
Google is currently a WHATWG member and clearly wields a great deal of influence there. And yeah, the 4 trillion dollar internet giant is powerful. No argument there.
> Rather: WHATWG was founded because the companies developing browsers (in particular Google) believed that what the W3C was working on for XHTML 2.0 was too academic, and went into a different direction than their (i.e. in particular Google's) vision for the web.
Mozilla, Opera and Apple. Google didn't have a browser then, hadn't even made the main hires who would start developing Chrome yet and hixie was still at Opera.
Rather: WHATWG was founded because the companies developing browsers (in particular Google) believed that what the W3C was working on for XHTML 2.0 was too academic, and went into a different direction than their (i.e. in particular Google's) vision for the web.