WHATWG

In 2004, the WHAT Working Group was formed with members from Mozilla, Apple, and Opera. The more commonly used name WHATWG stands for Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. The groups main goal was to enable the evolution and development of HTML. Slow development of HTML by W3C was also a reason for the group formation.

The focus of the group is the HTML standard, which also includes web storage, web sockets, web workers, and server-side events. There were other standards as well that were developed and discussed in the past. The editor of the specification is Ian "Hixie" Hickson (http://www.hixie.ch/).

We often referred to the WHATWG specification throughout the book, and it is the most up-to-date document, because it is a living standard. This means that the standard is continuously updated as requests for change arrive from the community. On the other hand, the specification does not simply break in backwards-incompatible ways.

More on the organization can be found from http://www.whatwg.org/.

There is also a developer oriented specification available at http://developers.whatwg.org/.