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Surely W3C and WHATWG would periodically branch and freeze a version of living standard? Possibly defining some elements as optional or extensions much like OpenGL or Vulkan? It seems crazy that they proposal introduced changes to what was already established common practice.

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The problem is that it is not a fast freeze. It goes through the full W3C process[1] WD > CR > PR > recommendation. When I looked at W3C html 5.2 there had been 10k changes to the WHATWG spec from the date of the 5.2 branch to the date of the 5.2 release.

The W3C allows changes that are incompatible with the WHATWG spec see DBaron's comments in the GitHub issues.

[1] https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/Process-19991111/proce...

We do this almost daily in the WHATWG :) https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/commit-snapshots/

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