Revise inaccurate homepage copy

[domenic]

Most HTML5 specifications are W3C TR documents, moving through the well-defined lifecycle of W3C specifications. There also is a small number of non-W3C specifications (which occasionally get adopted as W3C specifications when they gain widespread support).

In actuality, many foundational specifications are developed at other standards organizations: for example, HTTP at the IETF; JavaScript (ECMAScript) at Ecma; and most importantly, the many specs at https://spec.whatwg.org/ developed and maintained by the WHATWG.

The W3C sometimes copies and pastes/forks WHATWG work and puts their logo on it; see https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Fork_tracking. We've asked them many times to stop doing this, but they continue; see e.g. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2014Apr/0034.html. So far they have not started copying from the IETF or Ecma, but it's worth keeping an eye out for instances of that happening in the future. The copying does not indicate that the standard has transitioned to widespread support, simply that the W3C has taken notice and devoted staff resources to forking.

Additionally, TR documents are generally not valuable; "TR stands for trash" is the common way of saying that TR documents are almost always outdated snapshots of the editors drafts, which are what web developers and browser implementers should be consulting.

My suggested revision, omitting any mention of the forking, would be something like:

Several standards organizations collaborate in the development of the web platform ("HTML5"), notably Ecma, the IETF, the W3C, and the WHATWG. The main HTML Standard (often called "HTML5") is maintained by the WHATWG, along with other foundational parts of the ecosystem like the DOM, URLs, or Fetch. The JavaScript language is maintained by Ecma under the name "ECMAScript". Much of the networking layer, such as HTTP, is maintained by the IETF. The W3C serves as a home for many more specifications touching on other areas of the web platform, such as media and web application security specifications.

---

I have a feeling this discussion is not going to result in the kind of changes that I think would be healthy for developers, given the site's current W3C-centric and process-centric focus. (E.g. delineating things by their stage in the process, instead of just pointing to the most up to date editor's draft.) That is fine; I have so far referred people to https://platform.html5.org/ as something which I think does a healthy job of referring developers to the most up to date spec, and not linking to forks. So please forgive me for not engaging extensively in this discussion beyond just filing this issue, if the site is intent on maintaining its current course. But from the quick Twitter discussion I saw between you and @sideshowbarker, it seems like there is some desire to produce something that's most helpful for developers, and perhaps the current setup is just a result of being misled by the W3C marketing team in various ways. If that's the case I'd love to help guide the site toward something that's better for the health of the web.

[zcorpan]

I think the suggested wording is OK but it should also say that CSS is developed in the csswg at the W3C, and maybe mention some things that have been successful in WICG like IntersectionObserver (and maybe also point out that WICG is a good place to try ideas that might well fail, since that is part of the point of WICG as I understand it).

[zcorpan]

Sorry, I see now CSS seems out of scope here, or is at least currently not covered in this project. Still there are lots of non-fork specs at the W3C.