See also the HTML Standard FAQ.
The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) is a community of people interested in evolving the web through standards and tests.
The WHATWG was founded by individuals of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software in 2004, after a W3C workshop. Apple, Mozilla and Opera were becoming increasingly concerned about the W3C’s direction with XHTML, lack of interest in HTML, and apparent disregard for the needs of real-world web developers. So, in response, these organisations set out with a mission to address these concerns and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group was born.
In 2017, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla helped develop an IPR policy and governance structure for the WHATWG, together forming a Steering Group to oversee relevant policies.
It is spelled WHATWG, all uppercase, no spaces. It has various pronunciations: what-wee-gee, what-wig, what-double-you-gee.
The WHATWG’s focus is on standards implementable in web browsers, and their associated tests. Our existing work can be seen on the standards page.
There are lots of ways you can get involved! You might want to get started by reviewing the standards and filing issues. You can also browse our list of good first issues on GitHub, if you're interested in helping us editing the standards directly. Also, feel free to join Chat and ask questions of other community members.
For more information, see our dedicated site at participate.whatwg.org. Additionally, this video from Domenic Denicola is a good introduction to working with standards bodies.
Yes, everyone can contribute. There are no memberships fees involved; it’s an open process. See our participation page for more information. Participation can be done entirely over the internet; no binding decisions are made during in-person meetings. That is, decisions made during the odd meeting are tentative and subject to appeal from those not present.
Working Mode describes the day-to-day process in detail. Most of the activity consists of collaboration on GitHub.
In brief, each standard has one or more editors, who guide its evolution. Like a software project, a WHATWG standard undergoes continual maintenance, and occasionally gets new features. This work is driven by the community in collaboration with implementers.
Much of the time, discussions in the WHATWG are straightforward, with everyone collaborating on an effort to change the standard according to our working mode. As a community, we evaluate suggested changes on their merit, and convince one another as to the right path forward.
In cases where community members disagree, the burden is on the editors to evaluate the various positions that have been put forward in a discussion, and figure out which one is strongest (or find another position that strikes a better balance between all of them).
The purpose of debate at the WHATWG therefore isn’t to convince everyone; it is to put forward the arguments that exist, so that the relevant editor can make a well-informed decision. As a corollary: If some points are made, rebutted, and not further defended, then maybe the person making the arguments is hoping that the relevant editor will consider the rebuttals weak, or thinks that the argument they have presented is strong despite the rebuttals. If you find someone is not making good arguments, or is ignoring your arguments, your best bet is to stop responding. Repeating previously-stated arguments doesn’t help, since the editors will see all the arguments when they look at the thread. Similarly, as soon as threads start being meta-threads about people’s argumentation behaviour, we stop making any kind of useful progress, since that isn’t input that can help the decision-making process later.
The WHATWG strives for rough, informal consensus among contributors when drafting Living Standards. After considering input from all parties, the editor of a Living Standard makes the judgment as to whether a feature has enough support behind it to include. Those disagreeing with the editor's judgment can, under what we hope are exceptional circumstances, appeal to the Steering Group, which does have a formal consensus policy.
For more information on how decisions are made, see the Working Mode.
The community working there. Living Standards are informed by input from contributors, driven by workstream participants, articulated by editors, and coordinated by the Steering Group. If necessary, controversies are resolved by the Steering Group with members appointed from the organizations that develop browser engines, as a backstop to ensure the editor's judgment aligns with what they will implement. Substantive technical objections are considered and resolved by the Steering Group, consistent with the principles of the WHATWG.
File an issue on the relevant standard as indicated at the top of that standard. All feedback is supposed to be addressed in due course. You are also welcome to take a stab at addressing the problem yourself through a GitHub pull request.
If you want feedback to be dealt with faster than “eventually”, e.g., because you are about to work on that feature and need the standard to be updated to take into account all previous feedback, let the editors know by either emailing them, or contacting them on IRC. Requests for priority feedback handling are handled confidentially if desired so other implementers won’t know that you are working on that feature.
In general, it is very hard to remove features from the web platform, as implementers are hesitant to break web pages. Remember that WHATWG standards are intended to align with the reality of what implementers support and web pages use; they are not meant to be perfect reflections of a pure platform with no rough edges.
That said, we do sometimes remove things from the platform! This is usually a very tricky effort, involving the coordination among multiple implementations and extensive telemetry to quantify how many web pages would have their behavior changed. But when the feature is sufficiently insecure, harmful to users, or is used very rarely, this can be done. And once implementers have agreed to remove the feature from their browsers, we can work together to remove it from the standard.
A recent removal from the platform is the
AppCache feature. Other notable removals
are the applet and
keygen elements. An in-progress
removal, which may or may not be successful, is
synchronous XMLHttpRequest.
The process is rather informal, but basically boils down to this:
Forget about the particular solution you have in mind! Solution time is later!
Write down a description of the underlying problem you’re trying to solve. What are the use cases? A use case is an actual user wanting to do something. Then list requirements for each use case. For a good example of how to do this, see