A “who-does-what-where-and-has-what-say” primer

I’m confused about the relationship between content on:

• http://www.w3.org/
• https://github.com/w3c
• https://dvcs.w3.org
• w3 mailing lists
• https://whatwg.org
• https://github.com/whatwg
• whatwg mailing lists
• MediaWikis for W3C and WHATWG
• https://wiki.csswg.org
• https://webplatform.org
• https://discourse.wicg.io (soon to be discuss.webplatform.org, any day now)
• https://github.com/webspecs
• https://esdiscuss.org/
• ECMA, TC39, ES6, ES2015, the Harmony Doku wiki
• IEEE, IETF, IANA, ICANN
• https://html5rocks.com, html5please MDN, caniuse, https://www.chromestatus.org/
• https://github.com/h5bp/lazyweb-requests

In addition to the membership structures and relationships between the above and:

• Vendors (even stuff like the WebKit/Blink/Opera dynamic is confusing)
• Prolific contributors (like Adobe who appear to be pretty much driving CSS filters by themselves)
• Prolific framework developers (eg. jQuery is now the maintainer of the Pointer Events polyfill Google made and may or may not have a seat in the WG. Also h5bp as mentioned above)
• Web development communities (from Hacker News to GitHub to Twitter to https://reddit.com/r/web_design to Stack Overflow)
• Node.js

Stuff that would be nice to clear this up

• A graph (like, in GraphViz) of nodes for groups (projects) and the members on them (which could then be dropped into something like Sigma.js to visualize what these structures look like).
  • I’m working on this now at https://github.com/stuartpb/w5-graph
• A Sankey diagram of how these groups interact (ie. stuff gets drafted by whatwg, gets picked up by w3c, and then implemented by browsers - except when it goes in the complete other direction)
• An oral history of how these groups (and tools) were formed, have organized themselves, and are working today

Yup this would be very useful, I only found out the other day that WHATWG are unlikely to draft all work with the w3c.

I just found http://www.w3.org/html/landscape/ - it looks like a pretty good document in this space, although it hasn’t been updated in a year and I think it should really be transferred to something like a GitHub repo under the WICG (since this is the kind of thing that is prone to needing constant updates, and Robin has a tendency to go AWOL for long spans of time right when you need him to update something).

Really, while I still want to do the curated automatically-visualized, all-encompassing Giant Global Graph of all web contributors, projects, and networks I mentioned earlier, I think it’d probably be enough to draw up a simple infographic saying “This is the WICG, this is the WHATWG, this is the W3C, and these are the vendors”, with a few blurbs saying how they tend to interact (including what rules and criteria they have for accepting stuff from each other).

(At the time I originally wrote the OP, there was no WICG, and so the contribution landscape was hairy enough that a dynamically-visualized hairball actually was the best bet at explaining how anything worked.)

• https://webplatform.org

That one has the stench of death about it, and should probably given the Old Yeller treatment. It was a reasonable but IMHO now-failed experiment. MDN has remained the undefeated champion among web standards reference documentation wikis.

https://twitter.com/sideshowbarker/status/593678465037045761

https://twitter.com/sideshowbarker/status/593679078730772480

https://twitter.com/sideshowbarker/status/593681809885401088

https://twitter.com/sideshowbarker/status/593682932801245184

https://platform.html5.org/

That page attempts just to list all the relevant specs. While the relationships among the various group and organizations involved and the history behind them are interesting, in the end IMHO what really matters is what interoperable technologies are implemented in multiple browser engines. And that’s the information https://platform.html5.org/ attempts to provide.