If you like what the W3C is doing for the privacy, accessibility and openness of
the Web, you can become a W3C participant. Upon finding a W3C Working
Group[1] to which you think you could contribute, you can send an email to the
address of that WG's 'Staff Contact' explaining how you think you could help. If
the Chairs and the Staff Contact agree, they will ask you to join as an 'Invited
Expert' (IE). This does not confer voting rights but grants you access to the
meetings, relevant Git repositories etc. You'll need to sign a licensing agreement allowing the W3C to freely publish your contributions.
I say this because, at first glance, it seems like the only stakeholders with
any influence are W3C Members. The reality is that W3C is very open to
contributions from individuals, but just has had a constitutional framework that
makes things slightly more complicated for individuals, a situation which they are
deliberately improving.
As for myself, I'm an IE for the W3C in the Linked Data area, so whilst of course I do not speak for the W3C, I would be more than happy to answer questions here on HN about how the W3C works.
His team lead (Dmitry Zagidulin) liked what we were doing a lot. But ultimately Tim chose to go in a different direction, spun off "Inrupt" and left MIT. We continued building our open source platform to try to realize the vision he keeps writing about: https://theconversation.com/tim-berners-lees-plan-to-save-th...
Ultimately, my point is that we tried our best. I even hired Dmitry when he left Tim's project for a while, but very quickly Dmitry got demotivated to work with us because we were putting out working code for customers, instead of conforming to standards. Back then I argued to him that we don't have a ton of funding and executions matters more, after which the winners can help spearhead the standards. After all, Twitter pioneered oAuth, and Meebo+Google pioneered xAuth (if anyone remembers that). Dmitri and I did.
So we went our separate ways, and I realized that standards are an expensive detour that can work if you have extra funds to hire people. We plan to support Matrix, Mastodon and other interoperability. But for the time being, our platform is "just" free and open source.
Whether it's the UBI "movement", or the decentralized web, or other initiatives, everyone seems to go their separate way and it fizzles out (e.g. https://decentralizedweb.net and https://indieweb.org/). I wish people were willing to join forces on projects more, and get each other funded. That's how we can build real open source alternatives to the corporate internet we are all forced to depend on.
W3C and IETF standards are aspirational wishes that vendors routinely violate or ignore with intent or by buggy code. It's the responsibility of all ethical engineers to:
0. seek out appropriate, minimum friction standards before reinventing the wheel
Thanks for your interesting response. Although I don't really want to admit it, you are right in some cases that "standards are an expensive detour", because I've been involved with one of those myself! On the other hand, when the object of standardisation is very clearly defined, eminently possible and widely usable, a consensus-backed standard can be made very rapidly indeed.
Data canonicalisation is one such example: although the idea has been around for quite a while, a couple of years ago lots of people spontaneously decided it was something they needed (myself included!), and here we are with RDF canonicalisation[1] nearing Candidate Recommendation not even halfway through its WG's charter, along with several mutually independent approaches also in a good state of development. The result of this is that in about one more year from now, software developers will find cryptographic verification of data considerably more consistent, which can be translated into a pretty significant boon for Web users.
The ideal timing of a standard is surely after the limits of the idea have been found by theorising or prototyping, and before anyone with that idea has a large enough commercial interest in it to benefit from a monopoly on it. Trying to build a monopoly first and then 'donating' it by spearheading a standard is a viable technique, but it feels risky to me unless you can be sure that you're really the only party who understands the idea, and so won't be overtaken by someone with equally monopolistic but less altruistic motives.
I think that a good place to start is limiting the scope of a proposed standard very consciously, unless as you say you have the funds to hire everyone you need to implement it entirely at least once. Although I'm not familiar enough with your project to comment on any details, I suspect that most social network or forum applications could implement one way ActivityPub or Matrix support easily, and also proper two-way federation unless the original software makes too many assumptions about identity.
I would like to suport the W3C Line Mode Browser. It still compiles on the present-day computers I have; I use it from time to time for the nostalgia, to remind myslef how fast computers and the internet have become.
That's good to hear because I really wanted to join one of the more recent groups that were formed about a year or two ago, but I didn't make the open invitations in time. Figured the door was closed but I've thought about reaching out to offer.
I'd believe this- if it were not for the fact that Google is ignoring the W3C across the board. This includes privacy sandbox (fledge) and topics (floc) as well. Google can come up with good reasons why something that has negative impacts on the entirety of the ecosystem (except them), because it always ends with Google in a stronger position
What's there to believe? Standards follow implementations. The W3C aren't the browser police; they just standardize the interoperable things browsers do.
It's not W3C's (or WhatWG's) role to "oppose" random things browser vendors decide to do.
The W3C's draft vision statement [0] clearly states:
> Aim to reduce centralization in Web architecture, minimizing single points of failure and single points of control.
IMO it is entirely in scope for, and part of the responsibility of, the W3C to introduce a specification that explicitly forbids user agents from implementing Web Environment Integrity or any similar system as currently drafted.
One might say that the members' conflicts of interest make it likely that they will abdicate this responsibility, but that doesn't make it any less their role!
It's not really that Google is ignoring the standards process. It's that the process involves a feature-flagged shipped implementation before it can be a part of the standard.
The only way for FLoC to become a standard is for them to do exactly what they're doing now - opt in/feature-flagged evaluation.
Of course, Google could continue to ignore the standards process and just make this generally available in their browser even if it doesn't become a standard.
> Of course, Google could continue to ignore the standards process and just make this generally available in their browser even if it doesn't become a standard.
That's exactly what they've been doing with dozens of "standards".
And Google wanted WebM to happen and for people to pay full-retail price for rented games.
Google isn't (yet) big enough to force it through: given iOS marketshare in the US it means web-app devs won't (can't?) do anything unless both Apple and Google adopt it (yes, there are plenty of Chrome-only websites, and Safari has been slow to adopt new web-standards, especially when they begin to tread on the toes of Apple's App Store (PWAs, WebUSB, etc).
----
That said, I am sympathetic to the reasons why orgs like banks want things like remote-device attestation (and am less sympathetic to the likes of the MPAA, etc) - it is unfortunate that better ideas are hard to come by.
> I am sympathetic to the reasons why orgs like banks want things like remote-device attestation
I'm not. I mean, I am in theory; being able to warn a user their device might have some sort of malware upon trying to log into a banking website is useful, but we've already seen how banks handle these things in practice with mobile devices having attestation capabilities.
The result is some banking apps refuse to run on my phone with a very up-to-date and definitely not compromised LineageOS, but will happily run on devices several years out of date. Google SafetyNet can tell that the bootloader is locked and the system partition hasn't been modified, but can't tell that some malware has gained root access by privilege escalation.
I don't want them doing that to their websites as well. This technology should not be let loose on the world.
> Safari has been slow to adopt new web-standards, especially when they begin to tread on the toes of Apple's App Store
Cautious.
Many of those web-standards e.g. WebUSB have significant security vectors and have been used in the past to fingerprint devices for advertiser tracking. Also many have impacts on battery life and performance.
Whereas Chrome seems to be getting slower and bloated over time, Safari has remained fast and light-weight.
And we still have people crying Safari being new IE all the time. The remaining minor incompatibilities that we have now are nothing compared to what we had in IE6 days, and yes, this is the price we pay for not giving complete control of the web to a single ad company.
At the core of this allegation appears to be Google's decision to push hardware makers to adopt the AV1 codec, an open video codec that promises better-looking 4K videos at lower bitrates. As Protocol first reported in October, Google is requiring makers of Android TV devices to support AV1 starting this month. Additionally, Google also seems to push makers of smart TVs and streaming devices not based on Android TV to use AV1 for YouTube.
...
Google has long forced device makers to use the free VP9 codec for 4K YouTube streams.
> Safari has been slow to adopt new web-standards, especially when they begin to tread on the toes of Apple's App Store (PWAs, WebUSB, etc).
Many of those are not "new web standards". Those are Chrome-only non-standards, and Firefox agrees with Safari on most of them.
As for PWAs, there's no such thing as a single PWA standard, and Safari has supported the vast majority of the PWA standards for years (but if you point that out, the goalposts of what constitutes a PWA shift faster than superheated plasma).
This is true in the sense that Google is running an experiment (an "origin trial") and they didn't need anyone's permission to do that. (None of the other browser vendors need to get permission to run an experiment either.)
That's different from making it a web standard. They will want cooperation from other browser vendors (not random people on the Internet) for that.
I doubt they'll make a serious effort at convincing anyone of anything until they decide what they want to do, which will be based on the results of the experiment.
Has there ever been an anti-trust suit on the grounds that an actor is using their market dominance to subvert a standards process/body? Is there any legal precedent or standing for such a thing in the US or elsewhere?
Not a perfect example, but the UK CMA took issue with the removal of third party cookies from Chrome because of concern about anti competitive impact on digital advertising and managed to extract some pledges from Google.
I don't think web standards work that way. Often times we'll see things get deployed and implemented before they become standards anyway. And it's not as if W3C has any authority. But even if W3C had any authority, Google and Apple would just pay off every seat.
Considers who was on the other side of the military conflict in which the first, only, and still active UN military command was involved as a direct party and...
I like the idea of spinning Chrome out, but how would that work in practice?
Seems like making a browser isn’t profitable at all, and so the hypothetical Chrome Browser Corporation would probably quickly turn to evil tracking schemes as well.
If Blink and Chrome were to be spun out, it should probably be into something like a non-profit organization funded by sponsors, with a model similar to that of Blender. The only difference is that given Blink/Chrome's dominance, it'd be necessary to bar Alphabet and other companies with overwhelming power in web tech from becoming sponsors to help prevent conflict of interest.
This could have the effect of normalizing corporate investment in FOSS web engines and browsers, which could benefit Mozilla as well.
The browsers keep circumventing them, so the W3C seems more ceremonial than a real standards body. In an ideal world something like the W3C would own Chromium, but alas...
A suite of tests might be better: point them at a candidate browser and they'll tell you which naughty and which nice features that browser supports.
Then point the other half of the test suite at a candidate site and get a similar list of naughies and nices.
Conscientious technologists of the world can then refuse to support browsers or sites that test naughty.
This is my attempt to avoid preaching to the choir. Market share wise, only a tiny slice would opt into the non-evil browser. But it's that slice who also makes things work for the rest of the world, so:
> it's out of my scope of support unless it passes these tests
As long as google gets to use its monopoly to push chrome-by-default on its platforms while breaking open safari, none of that matters. The council of neckbeards representing 2% of browser share is as relevant as polling slashdot opinions, in terms of actual effected change on the world.
When those neckbeards represent 50-60% of total web traffic their opinion might matter. Marketshare is power and in realpolitik power is all that matters. The tech world is littered with the remains of the companies that made principled stands, google and Microsoft are where they are for a reason and it’s not because of their overriding morals.
Right now google has >80% of traffic and now that they have pried safari open that number is gonna climb. Their opinion is literally the only one that matters - what are you gonna do, not use google products?
if google wants to fight they’ll win, have fun getting into your gmail account if they require attestation. What are you gonna do, not use email? Change your whole internet identity to not run on google? Gmail is effectively email, and small mailservers are fundamentally broken on the modern web. Even for things like outlook.com they could require that other mailservers provide the attestation used to send it and lock people out of gmail entirely, even just needing to gmail.
It’s game over, the apple sideloading case swept away the last resistance to chrome monoculture, and google already runs a supermajority of the other web services that matter. This is google flexing their muscles now that they know they’re utterly unopposed. But unfortunately the EU is way more concerned with outlawing the lightning port and mandating 2000s-vintage removable battery phone designs than actually fighting a monopoly using its monopoly power to leverage abusive behavior in related market segments to the detriment of consumers.
This is a classic useful-idiot situation where all the android fanboys waved their flags at their “team win” over “braindead” apple fans getting the app-review process neutered by sideloading. Because it’s not enough to have a popular brand which supports that too, you need to outlaw any alternative business models to your preferred brand. And despite warnings that exactly this chrome monoculture would be the outcome, people pushed for it anyway. Wait and see, they said, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it and if google starts to be a problem the EU will step in. It took literally a matter of weeks before google just went ahead and crossed that bridge. Extremely frustrating.
And yea, safari has some attestation features too. Not necessarily the same ones as google, and they don’t prevent Wipr or Adblock Plus extensions from working. But now you’ve gone and made sure there’s no alternative browsers that don’t, either. You pushed this on yourself. sideloading has locked in an unshakeable chrome monopoly marketshare, it’s going to be a massive uphill battle to sell people on Firefox when it doesn’t even work on almost any relevant web services because it doesn’t (by design) allow attestation.
Almost as if... most of Apple's iOS stances aren't just random/exploitative, but actually have some basis in security posture or app-review. And almost as if... Apple is still fundamentally trying to sell you a phone first and foremost, then icloud/apple music revenue, and then adtech is way down on the list, while google makes all its money from (a) ecosystem effect and the monopolistic behaviors it allows, and (b) direct revenue from adtech. People keep trying to push the "apple is the same thing!" and just like you can see from their attestation not caring about adblocking, it's really not.
I loathe that the brand wars have gotten to this place, "both sides are the same" but also they are different enough that you need to literally outlaw the business model of your competition and reduce choice in the market. Can't let some "brainless" apple fan make a different choice from you, you know best for everyone.
the W3C's role has been explicitly and intentionally ceremonial since they tried to invent xhtml, and learned exactly how much power they really have.
their mission is only to write formal standards to describe and document the things that browsers have already implemented, not to drive browser development.
E.g., I don't see WHATWG contributing anything of relevance regarding web accessibility, whereas W3C takes care of accessibility with WAI-ARIA and WCAG.
My understanding is that WHATWG doesn't govern standards at all - it basically documents what browsers are doing at the moment. So when Google rolls WEI in a Chrome update, it will become a WHATWG "standard" automatically. Is that correct?
Readit News
I say this because, at first glance, it seems like the only stakeholders with any influence are W3C Members. The reality is that W3C is very open to contributions from individuals, but just has had a constitutional framework that makes things slightly more complicated for individuals, a situation which they are deliberately improving.
As for myself, I'm an IE for the W3C in the Linked Data area, so whilst of course I do not speak for the W3C, I would be more than happy to answer questions here on HN about how the W3C works.
[1]: https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/
His team lead (Dmitry Zagidulin) liked what we were doing a lot. But ultimately Tim chose to go in a different direction, spun off "Inrupt" and left MIT. We continued building our open source platform to try to realize the vision he keeps writing about: https://theconversation.com/tim-berners-lees-plan-to-save-th...
I was writing very similar things, but of course I didn't invent the Web: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...
Ultimately, my point is that we tried our best. I even hired Dmitry when he left Tim's project for a while, but very quickly Dmitry got demotivated to work with us because we were putting out working code for customers, instead of conforming to standards. Back then I argued to him that we don't have a ton of funding and executions matters more, after which the winners can help spearhead the standards. After all, Twitter pioneered oAuth, and Meebo+Google pioneered xAuth (if anyone remembers that). Dmitri and I did.
So we went our separate ways, and I realized that standards are an expensive detour that can work if you have extra funds to hire people. We plan to support Matrix, Mastodon and other interoperability. But for the time being, our platform is "just" free and open source.
Whether it's the UBI "movement", or the decentralized web, or other initiatives, everyone seems to go their separate way and it fizzles out (e.g. https://decentralizedweb.net and https://indieweb.org/). I wish people were willing to join forces on projects more, and get each other funded. That's how we can build real open source alternatives to the corporate internet we are all forced to depend on.
0. seek out appropriate, minimum friction standards before reinventing the wheel
1. refuse to implement solutions that harm users
Data canonicalisation is one such example: although the idea has been around for quite a while, a couple of years ago lots of people spontaneously decided it was something they needed (myself included!), and here we are with RDF canonicalisation[1] nearing Candidate Recommendation not even halfway through its WG's charter, along with several mutually independent approaches also in a good state of development. The result of this is that in about one more year from now, software developers will find cryptographic verification of data considerably more consistent, which can be translated into a pretty significant boon for Web users.
The ideal timing of a standard is surely after the limits of the idea have been found by theorising or prototyping, and before anyone with that idea has a large enough commercial interest in it to benefit from a monopoly on it. Trying to build a monopoly first and then 'donating' it by spearheading a standard is a viable technique, but it feels risky to me unless you can be sure that you're really the only party who understands the idea, and so won't be overtaken by someone with equally monopolistic but less altruistic motives.
I think that a good place to start is limiting the scope of a proposed standard very consciously, unless as you say you have the funds to hire everyone you need to implement it entirely at least once. Although I'm not familiar enough with your project to comment on any details, I suspect that most social network or forum applications could implement one way ActivityPub or Matrix support easily, and also proper two-way federation unless the original software makes too many assumptions about identity.
[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-canon/
It's not W3C's (or WhatWG's) role to "oppose" random things browser vendors decide to do.
> Aim to reduce centralization in Web architecture, minimizing single points of failure and single points of control.
IMO it is entirely in scope for, and part of the responsibility of, the W3C to introduce a specification that explicitly forbids user agents from implementing Web Environment Integrity or any similar system as currently drafted.
One might say that the members' conflicts of interest make it likely that they will abdicate this responsibility, but that doesn't make it any less their role!
[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/w3c-vision/#principles
Then why are they making standards in the first place?
They're already deeply involved in the operation of browsers; they are practically morally obliged to object to things which could harm the Web.
The only way for FLoC to become a standard is for them to do exactly what they're doing now - opt in/feature-flagged evaluation.
Of course, Google could continue to ignore the standards process and just make this generally available in their browser even if it doesn't become a standard.
That's exactly what they've been doing with dozens of "standards".
Google isn't (yet) big enough to force it through: given iOS marketshare in the US it means web-app devs won't (can't?) do anything unless both Apple and Google adopt it (yes, there are plenty of Chrome-only websites, and Safari has been slow to adopt new web-standards, especially when they begin to tread on the toes of Apple's App Store (PWAs, WebUSB, etc).
----
That said, I am sympathetic to the reasons why orgs like banks want things like remote-device attestation (and am less sympathetic to the likes of the MPAA, etc) - it is unfortunate that better ideas are hard to come by.
I'm not. I mean, I am in theory; being able to warn a user their device might have some sort of malware upon trying to log into a banking website is useful, but we've already seen how banks handle these things in practice with mobile devices having attestation capabilities.
The result is some banking apps refuse to run on my phone with a very up-to-date and definitely not compromised LineageOS, but will happily run on devices several years out of date. Google SafetyNet can tell that the bootloader is locked and the system partition hasn't been modified, but can't tell that some malware has gained root access by privilege escalation.
I don't want them doing that to their websites as well. This technology should not be let loose on the world.
Cautious.
Many of those web-standards e.g. WebUSB have significant security vectors and have been used in the past to fingerprint devices for advertiser tracking. Also many have impacts on battery life and performance.
Whereas Chrome seems to be getting slower and bloated over time, Safari has remained fast and light-weight.
When they want, Google literally strongarms various vendors into implementing their codecs: https://www.protocol.com/youtube-tv-roku-issues
--- start quote ---
At the core of this allegation appears to be Google's decision to push hardware makers to adopt the AV1 codec, an open video codec that promises better-looking 4K videos at lower bitrates. As Protocol first reported in October, Google is requiring makers of Android TV devices to support AV1 starting this month. Additionally, Google also seems to push makers of smart TVs and streaming devices not based on Android TV to use AV1 for YouTube.
...
Google has long forced device makers to use the free VP9 codec for 4K YouTube streams.
--- end quote ---
Many of those are not "new web standards". Those are Chrome-only non-standards, and Firefox agrees with Safari on most of them.
As for PWAs, there's no such thing as a single PWA standard, and Safari has supported the vast majority of the PWA standards for years (but if you point that out, the goalposts of what constitutes a PWA shift faster than superheated plasma).
That's different from making it a web standard. They will want cooperation from other browser vendors (not random people on the Internet) for that.
I doubt they'll make a serious effort at convincing anyone of anything until they decide what they want to do, which will be based on the results of the experiment.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-29194320070828
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-standard/micros...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2548569/ecma-approves-...
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-regulator-accepts-google...
Not sure I understand your point.
Seems like making a browser isn’t profitable at all, and so the hypothetical Chrome Browser Corporation would probably quickly turn to evil tracking schemes as well.
This could have the effect of normalizing corporate investment in FOSS web engines and browsers, which could benefit Mozilla as well.
Are those accidentally reversed?
Then point the other half of the test suite at a candidate site and get a similar list of naughies and nices.
Conscientious technologists of the world can then refuse to support browsers or sites that test naughty.
This is my attempt to avoid preaching to the choir. Market share wise, only a tiny slice would opt into the non-evil browser. But it's that slice who also makes things work for the rest of the world, so:
> it's out of my scope of support unless it passes these tests
Might impact a wider audience.
When those neckbeards represent 50-60% of total web traffic their opinion might matter. Marketshare is power and in realpolitik power is all that matters. The tech world is littered with the remains of the companies that made principled stands, google and Microsoft are where they are for a reason and it’s not because of their overriding morals.
Right now google has >80% of traffic and now that they have pried safari open that number is gonna climb. Their opinion is literally the only one that matters - what are you gonna do, not use google products?
if google wants to fight they’ll win, have fun getting into your gmail account if they require attestation. What are you gonna do, not use email? Change your whole internet identity to not run on google? Gmail is effectively email, and small mailservers are fundamentally broken on the modern web. Even for things like outlook.com they could require that other mailservers provide the attestation used to send it and lock people out of gmail entirely, even just needing to gmail.
It’s game over, the apple sideloading case swept away the last resistance to chrome monoculture, and google already runs a supermajority of the other web services that matter. This is google flexing their muscles now that they know they’re utterly unopposed. But unfortunately the EU is way more concerned with outlawing the lightning port and mandating 2000s-vintage removable battery phone designs than actually fighting a monopoly using its monopoly power to leverage abusive behavior in related market segments to the detriment of consumers.
This is a classic useful-idiot situation where all the android fanboys waved their flags at their “team win” over “braindead” apple fans getting the app-review process neutered by sideloading. Because it’s not enough to have a popular brand which supports that too, you need to outlaw any alternative business models to your preferred brand. And despite warnings that exactly this chrome monoculture would be the outcome, people pushed for it anyway. Wait and see, they said, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it and if google starts to be a problem the EU will step in. It took literally a matter of weeks before google just went ahead and crossed that bridge. Extremely frustrating.
And yea, safari has some attestation features too. Not necessarily the same ones as google, and they don’t prevent Wipr or Adblock Plus extensions from working. But now you’ve gone and made sure there’s no alternative browsers that don’t, either. You pushed this on yourself. sideloading has locked in an unshakeable chrome monopoly marketshare, it’s going to be a massive uphill battle to sell people on Firefox when it doesn’t even work on almost any relevant web services because it doesn’t (by design) allow attestation.
Almost as if... most of Apple's iOS stances aren't just random/exploitative, but actually have some basis in security posture or app-review. And almost as if... Apple is still fundamentally trying to sell you a phone first and foremost, then icloud/apple music revenue, and then adtech is way down on the list, while google makes all its money from (a) ecosystem effect and the monopolistic behaviors it allows, and (b) direct revenue from adtech. People keep trying to push the "apple is the same thing!" and just like you can see from their attestation not caring about adblocking, it's really not.
I loathe that the brand wars have gotten to this place, "both sides are the same" but also they are different enough that you need to literally outlaw the business model of your competition and reduce choice in the market. Can't let some "brainless" apple fan make a different choice from you, you know best for everyone.
their mission is only to write formal standards to describe and document the things that browsers have already implemented, not to drive browser development.
- Accessibility
- Authentication
- CSS
- Self-Sovereign Identity
- Virtual Reality
- Linked Data
- XML
I wrote a comment about the W3C's relationship with WHATWG a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37052428
If you do nothing else, please pass your eyes over the list of W3C Recommendations and other publications on standards track: https://www.w3.org/TR/
And yes, even VRML :)
https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/ HTML 2 (the wild west)
https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Wilbur/ HTML 3.2
https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40-970708/appendix/changes.html Diffs of HTML 3.2 -> 4
https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html History of HTML until 3.2
https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/ HTML 4
https://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/ Diffs of HTML 4 -> 5
https://www.w3.org/TR/2021/NOTE-html53-20210128/ HTML 5.3 (last version on W3C)
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ HTML5.3+ (moved to whatwg)
https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/VRML/ Virtual Reality Markup Language
W3C is not only about HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium#St...
E.g., I don't see WHATWG contributing anything of relevance regarding web accessibility, whereas W3C takes care of accessibility with WAI-ARIA and WCAG.
https://web.archive.org/web/20041204114715/http://www.cc.uka...
A stance to irrelevance, sadly.
This was always the deal with the devil that W3C had; play ball with the vendors or get left in the dust.