Stephen Downes

There has been a longstanding tension between the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and various broowser vendors over the development of web standards. As usual, the vendors want to implement new features right away, and W3C wants to wait and seek consensus first. This has been aggrevated by the use of browser-specific tags for styling (such as moz-border-image and dozens of others). Now the much-awaited HTML5 specification is splitting between these two camps. But it's better not to see this as a parting of the ways. “The WHATWG effort is focused on developing the canonical description of HTML,” writes Hickson on the mailing list. “The W3C effort, meanwhile, is now focused on creating a snapshot developed according to the venerable W3C process.”