organizations like W3C and IEEE that define standards for how the internet works and how websites behave
Too bad those organizations kept dragging their feet, writing standards by committee and making them unimplementable, pushing stuff like XHTML that nobody in their sane mind wanted… until the WHATWG called quits on them and focused on a working living standard: a reference free open source browser that anyone could just copy+paste to meet the standard.
Nowadays we call that “Chromium”.
No actually we don’t. Chromium isn’t a reference implementation. And while XHTML was handled poorly the idea behind it was actually very interesting. Didn’t pan out and was buried years ago. So what.
Chromium isn’t a reference implementation
Could fool me, since it implements all WHATWG standards… or is it the other way around?
XHTML didn’t just “not pan out”; the W3C kept beating its dead horse carcass, like it did with many others. The W3C didn’t pan out and was handled poorly, even though the idea behind it was actually very interesting.
Why do you believe Google would not be able to ignore the WHATWG the same way they could ignore other standards organizations if they controlled the entire browser market?
Well, for starters the WHATWG listens to Google, not the other way around. And yeah, they do “control” the entire “browser market”, or more precisely, the part they care about: how to show ads.
