And you could go to a website and
end up being told that your browser is not compatible with this website so you have
to go get a different browser in order to even view the website to begin with.
Now around 1997 the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C, came up
with the first standard browsers actually started to pay somewhat attention to,
which is HTML4 and they very quickly updated it to HTML4.01.
That standard was, pretty loose, and, the browser's had, still had,
way too much leeway inside that standard,
as to how they implemented it, and how pages we're being rendered.
So, around 2000, the W3C came up with another specification called
XHTML 1.0 and that specification was based on XML.
And XML is a very rigid but very clear markup language.
In W3C wanted to kind of pick that up and keep going, with it and produce XHTML 2.0.
The problem is that the browser vendors which at this point already had
a history of not really listening a 100% to any standard, they decided that
this whole W3C thing is moving way too slowly, and on top of that,
they felt that the specifications are really moving in the wrong direction.
So the browsers banded together, the browser vendors banded together and they
created yet another group that produced specifications that was called WHATWG.
And WHATWG, that's yet
another abbreviation because we don't have enough of them.
So that group is called WHATWG and
it stands for Web Hypertext Application Technology Group.
So it's a bunch of browser vendors that got together.
And this group is much less democratic than the W3C.
In other words they have one central, one editor that makes the final decisions so
all the browser vendor representatives can argue all they want but
at the end the appointed one editor that kind of makes the final decisions.
And they're the ones that are driving the entire HTML5,
what we have now, they're the drivers behind it.
So for a long time the two organizations didn't really see eye to eye much at all
and they didn't work together, so
they were really going to two different directions.
But I think W3C eventually realized that hey, you know, that organization is
actually being driven by the people and by the companies that actually matter.
Because they are the guys who are developing the browsers themselves,
so maybe it's a good idea to kind of make peace and
try to see if we can work together somehow.
And this is what happened around 2007, 2009 time frame.
So WHATWG and W3C started sort of kind of working together.
And what they produced in the end is what we have now, HTML5.
So what does any of that matter to you?
Well what matters now is that there are two organizations out there, one is called
W3C and the other one is WHATWG and they're both in charge of HTML somewhat.
So it could be that you could get into a situation,
it's certainly possible that a browser potentially can be compliant
with a specification which isn't yet even formalized by the official W3C.
So, it makes your head spin a little bit, doesn't it?