WhatWG succeeded in unifying what was a horrible mess of intentionally and unintentionally incompatible implementations of the same standards in W3C and IETF. It fixed that by introducing rigor, tests, and clear language and by involving those actually trying to implement it on a basis of meritocracy while getting rid of the politics that prevented the W3C from doing anything productive on this front for well over a decade.
I've seen the mobile industry from the inside and knew several people in Nokia who were full time active in various standard bodies (including W3C). A lot of this activity was not motivated by wanting to improve standards or building stuff that implemented these standards but to ensure access to, and control over relevant IP and ensuring certain patents that Nokia had stayed relevant or making sure it had new patents covering key stuff being standardized that competitors might want or need. I know of several standards that Nokia was involved with that it never had any serious intention of implementing or supporting.
My understanding is that people from Apple, Google, Opera and Mozilla working on browser technology were very successful collaborating within WhatWG after they figured out that W3C was the wrong place for that. Even while their companies were competing very aggressively. These days it is common for complex web designs to just work across different browsers. WhatWG transformed a broken by design and obsolete standard that was being pulled in all sorts of directions by companies not involved with actually implementing it into something that actually works. That's no small achievement; so I think you are being a bit harsh on WhatWG.
Http is an interesting example because Http 2 only happended after Google pushed out Spdy and was adopted quite rapidly. IETF then did what it was supposed to do and rapidly developed HTTP 2 to replace spdy by something better that met the needs of people in the industry.
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WhatWG succeeded in unifying what was a horrible mess of intentionally and unintentionally incompatible implementations of the same standards in W3C and IETF. It fixed that by introducing rigor, tests, and clear language and by involving those actually trying to implement it on a basis of meritocracy while getting rid of the politics that prevented the W3C from doing anything productive on this front for well over a decade.
I've seen the mobile industry from the inside and knew several people in Nokia who were full time active in various standard bodies (including W3C). A lot of this activity was not motivated by wanting to improve standards or building stuff that implemented these standards but to ensure access to, and control over relevant IP and ensuring certain patents that Nokia had stayed relevant or making sure it had new patents covering key stuff being standardized that competitors might want or need. I know of several standards that Nokia was involved with that it never had any serious intention of implementing or supporting.
My understanding is that people from Apple, Google, Opera and Mozilla working on browser technology were very successful collaborating within WhatWG after they figured out that W3C was the wrong place for that. Even while their companies were competing very aggressively. These days it is common for complex web designs to just work across different browsers. WhatWG transformed a broken by design and obsolete standard that was being pulled in all sorts of directions by companies not involved with actually implementing it into something that actually works. That's no small achievement; so I think you are being a bit harsh on WhatWG.
Http is an interesting example because Http 2 only happended after Google pushed out Spdy and was adopted quite rapidly. IETF then did what it was supposed to do and rapidly developed HTTP 2 to replace spdy by something better that met the needs of people in the industry.