W3C vs WHATWG

It doesn't seem weird at all to me: standard is essentially the consensus of the major browser vendors; a spec which all of Chrome, Safari and Edge don't implement is really just a hypothetical.The origin story of whatwg is that Apple, Mozilla and Opera decided that W3C wasn't making specs that they wanted to implement, so they created a new working group to make them.

Too bad WHATWG has hijacked the standards.

Why don't the browser companies just entirely ignore the W3C from now on?

Google (WHATWG) putting "HTML living standard", "URL standard", etc. as heading on their their phone-book-sized monstrosities and calling it a day, then leveraging their power over Mozilla to bless it, then putting pressure over others as the media powerhouse they are, thereby driving browser vendors out of business, can hardly be described as "standard" or other process of finding consensus.

There are no web standards in the era of WHATWG. It’s just a living spec composed of whatever vendors build and convince other vendors to add to their own products. Chrome is constantly spitting out new proposals that are already half-baked-but-live in their browser and then people start using them and complain they aren’t yet in other browsers. Yet when Safari or Firefox add new features we don’t act like Chrome is slow? Chrome’s rapid pace is almost surely an effort by Google to overwhelm the

Browsers can't really unilaterally deprecate W3C standards especially when its already implemented in competing browsers.

Webkit by itself can't fuel the development of new standards. You need several competing parties for that.

Isn't this why we have the W3C, so standards don't get made unless multiple people benefit? This seems like Microsoft with IE6 all over again.

This is not remotely the case. W3C used to be the reference, up until when they obstinately championed XHTML 2.0 that nobody wanted to write. Meanwhile, browser vendors wanted to implement all the fun stuff that web apps need but were being blocked by the W3C's glacial speed. So they just founded the WHATWG for collaboration and standardization, and since then W3C has beed ripping off the WHATWG's standards but always with inexplicable alterations.

according to the people who write standards, but not the people who write browsers