WHATWG

What the WHATWG is

The WHATWG, short for Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, is the group that maintains the HTML Standard and a set of related web standards. Its FAQ describes it as “a community of people interested in evolving the web through standards and tests.”¹

Its home page says it has maintained and evolved HTML since 2004, and links to the HTML Living Standard and the group’s other standards.² As of October 22, 2026, its standards index lists 27 standards, from HTML and DOM to Fetch, URL and XMLHttpRequest.³

Every WHATWG standard is a Living Standard: a document that is updated continuously as feedback arrives, with new features added over time, and kept in line with what browsers actually do.¹ There are no version numbers.⁴ The HTML Living Standard showed a last-updated date of October 20, 2026, when this entry was checked.⁵

Taking part is free, open to anyone and can be done entirely online, by reviewing standards, filing issues on GitHub or joining the group’s chat.¹ The standards are published under liberal licenses that allow derivative works such as translations,¹ specifically Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).⁶

Why it was founded (2004)

The WHATWG grew out of a dispute over the future of HTML. In 1998, after HTML 4, the membership of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards body Tim Berners-Lee founded in 1994,⁷ decided to stop evolving HTML and to build an XML-based replacement, XHTML, instead.⁵

Interest in improving HTML itself returned in 2003, when W3C published XForms, a technology positioned as the next generation of web forms.⁵ At a W3C workshop on web applications and compound documents, held in San Jose, California, on June 1 and 2, 2004, and hosted by Adobe Systems,⁸ Mozilla and Opera presented a proposal to evolve HTML. It was rejected because it conflicted with the direction W3C had already chosen.⁵

Individuals from Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software then founded the WHATWG. The FAQ lists their concerns as the W3C’s direction with XHTML, its lack of interest in HTML and its “apparent disregard for the needs of real-world web developers.”¹

On June 4, 2004, Ian Hickson announced the group’s open mailing list, describing the WHATWG as a loose, unofficial and open collaboration of browser makers and other interested parties.⁹ The announcement set out three first specifications:⁹

• Web Forms 2.0: an incremental improvement of the forms in HTML 4.01.
• Web Apps 1.0: features for building applications in HTML.
• Web Controls 1.0: mechanisms for creating new interactive widgets.

The stated aim was to write specifications based on HTML that would make interoperable web applications easier to deploy, and eventually to submit the results to a standards organization. The group also promised to deal with backward compatibility and to specify error handling, so that browsers would treat broken pages the same way.⁹

From HTML5 to the Living Standard (2006 to 2014)

The W3C came back to HTML. In 2006 it said it wanted to take part in HTML5 after all, and in 2007 it formed a working group to develop the HTML5 specification together with the WHATWG.⁵

The two groups then wanted different things. The W3C wanted to publish a finished, numbered HTML5, while the WHATWG wanted to keep working on a Living Standard that is never declared complete.⁵

On January 19, 2011, Hickson announced that the WHATWG specification would drop the “5” and be called simply HTML, and that the group would no longer follow the snapshot model of publishing fixed versions. He left the job of a published HTML5 snapshot to the W3C, which was still working on it with the WHATWG.⁴

The W3C published HTML5 as a Recommendation on October 28, 2014. Its editors list Hickson, then at Google, for the WHATWG and six editors for the W3C.¹⁰

How the WHATWG works

The group took its present form in 2017. On December 11, 2017, Anne van Kesteren announced that Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, the companies behind the four major browser engines of the time, had jointly written a new intellectual property rights (IPR) policy and governance structure for the WHATWG.¹¹

At the top is the Steering Group. Its agreement, dated November 30, 2017, names Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and Apple as the initial members and gives the group “final say in all matters regarding the WHATWG.”¹² It must have between three and seven members, and new members can join only by unanimous consent.¹² Decisions with public effect are recorded in GitHub issues.¹³

The agreement describes the Steering Group’s mission as helping interoperability between the leading web platform engines, and it ends automatically if fewer than three members remain for 70 consecutive days.¹²

The day-to-day work is split into workstreams, each developing one Living Standard or a group of closely linked ones.¹¹ Ideally each has an editor, an active community, an issue tracker, a changelog and tests, and most hold no regular meetings.¹⁴ Each standard has one or more editors, who aim for rough consensus and make the final judgment, and disputes can be appealed to the Steering Group in exceptional cases.¹

A key rule in the group’s Working Mode is that the browsers must agree. Every normative change, meaning a change to what implementations must do, needs support from implementers, and an addition needs the support of at least two of them.¹⁴ That support does not oblige the browser makers to ship the feature.¹⁴

New features can be incubated outside the WHATWG, for example in another organization’s venue or a personal repository, but to enter a standard they need the same implementer support and tests.¹⁴ Because the text keeps changing, each Living Standard links to a frozen snapshot as of a given commit for anyone who needs a fixed copy.¹⁴

Patents are covered by snapshots. Roughly every six months each Living Standard is copied into a Review Draft for patent review, and participants who have signed the IPR Policy must license their essential patent claims royalty-free unless they exclude them within 45 days.¹⁶ The 2017 announcement said Review Drafts are for attorneys, and that developers should use the Living Standard.¹¹

The 2019 agreement with the W3C

For years the W3C and the WHATWG each published their own version of HTML. In a W3C blog post, Jeff Jaffe wrote that two distinct HTML and DOM specifications both claiming to be normative was generally harmful to the community, and that the two bodies had been exploring partnership since December 2017.¹⁵

A memorandum of understanding took effect on May 28, 2019. Under it, HTML and DOM are developed principally in the WHATWG under its Living Standard process, and the W3C stopped its plans for separate W3C versions, HTML 5.3 and DOM 4.1.¹⁶ The DOM (Document Object Model) is the in-memory model of a page that scripts use to read and change it.¹⁷

The W3C instead endorses WHATWG Review Drafts as W3C Recommendations and expects to do so at least once every 12 months. Each endorsed snapshot carries notes on implementation status, and features without two implementations are marked at risk or treated as informative rather than required. A W3C HTML Working Group gathers issues, which are resolved in the WHATWG’s GitHub repositories. If an objection cannot be settled with the WHATWG editors, it goes to the WHATWG Steering Group and can end with a W3C decision.¹⁶

The documents covered included the W3C Recommendations for HTML5, HTML 5.1 and HTML 5.2, along with those with the short names webstorage, webmessaging, eventsource and 2dcontext, which the W3C agreed to stop publishing as separate versions.¹⁶

The agreement also covered other WHATWG work. The W3C stopped publishing its own versions of CORS, Progress Events, Notifications and Encoding and points readers to the WHATWG versions.¹⁶

The W3C endorsed its first DOM snapshot on November 3, 2020, and its first HTML snapshot on January 28, 2021.¹⁸

The standards it maintains

The WHATWG index listed 27 standards as of October 22, 2026. Among them:³

The list also includes device standards for user-approved access to Bluetooth, HID, NFC, serial and USB peripherals, along with Compatibility and Quirks Mode, which describe nonstandard browser behaviors kept for compatibility, and Web IDL, the language used to define browser interfaces.³

Browser makers also coordinate outside the standards. The yearly Interop project, run by representatives of companies including Apple, Google, Igalia, Microsoft and Mozilla, aims to make key features work the same across browsers. Its 2026 focus areas include dialogs and popovers, the Navigation API and Fetch uploads and ranges.¹⁹

Timeline

1. February 12, 2026Interop 2026 announced, including dialogs, popovers and Fetch work¹⁹
2. January 28, 2021W3C endorses its first WHATWG HTML Review Draft as a Recommendation¹⁸
3. November 3, 2020W3C endorses its first WHATWG DOM snapshot¹⁸
4. May 28, 2019Memorandum of understanding: HTML and DOM developed principally at the WHATWG¹⁶
5. December 11, 2017New IPR policy and Steering Group announced¹¹
6. November 30, 2017Steering Group Agreement signed by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla¹²
7. October 28, 2014W3C publishes HTML5 as a Recommendation, with Ian Hickson as WHATWG editor¹⁰
8. January 19, 2011HTML5 renamed "HTML" and declared a living standard⁴
9. 2007W3C forms a working group to develop HTML5 with the WHATWG⁵
10. June 4, 2004Ian Hickson announces the WHATWG open mailing list⁹
11. June 2004W3C workshop in San Jose rejects Mozilla and Opera proposal⁸

What it means for your website

See also

• HTML
• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
• JavaScript
• Browser wars
• Mozilla Foundation (coming soon)
• How does a website work

References

1. FAQ. WHATWG. accessed October 22, 2026.
2. Welcome to the WHATWG community. WHATWG. accessed October 22, 2026.
3. Standards. WHATWG. accessed October 22, 2026.
4. HTML is the new HTML5. The WHATWG Blog (Ian Hickson). 2011-01-19. accessed October 22, 2026.
5. HTML Living Standard, section 1: Introduction (History). WHATWG. 2026-10-20. accessed October 22, 2026.
6. Intellectual Property Rights Policy. WHATWG. accessed October 22, 2026.
7. W3C history. World Wide Web Consortium. accessed October 22, 2026.
8. W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents. W3C. 2004-06. accessed October 22, 2026.
9. WHAT open mailing list announcement. WHATWG (Ian Hickson). 2004-06-04. accessed October 22, 2026.
10. HTML5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML (W3C Recommendation). W3C. 2014-10-28. accessed October 22, 2026.
11. Further working mode changes. The WHATWG Blog (Anne van Kesteren). 2017-12-11. accessed October 22, 2026.
12. WHATWG Steering Group Agreement. WHATWG. 2017-11-30. accessed October 22, 2026.
13. Steering Group Policy. WHATWG. accessed October 22, 2026.
14. Working Mode. WHATWG. accessed October 22, 2026.
15. W3C and WHATWG to work together to advance the open Web platform. W3C blog (Jeff Jaffe). 2019-05-28. accessed October 22, 2026.
16. Memorandum of Understanding Between W3C and WHATWG. W3C and WHATWG. 2019-05-28. accessed October 22, 2026.
17. Introduction to the DOM. MDN Web Docs (Mozilla). accessed October 22, 2026.
18. WHATWG Review Drafts of HTML and DOM endorsed as W3C Recommendations. W3C blog (Philippe le Hegaret). 2021-01-28. accessed October 22, 2026.
19. Interop 2026: Continuing to improve the web for developers. web.dev (Google). 2026-02-12. accessed October 22, 2026.
20. Baseline. web.dev (Google). accessed October 22, 2026.
21. HTML Conformance Checkers. WHATWG. accessed October 22, 2026.
22. HTML Living Standard: Edition for Web Developers. WHATWG. 2026-10-20. accessed October 22, 2026.

Web Building Encyclopedia. First published October 22, 2026. Last reviewed October 22, 2026. Every fact on this page is linked to a source we opened. Spotted an error? Write to [email protected].