Diversity in implementation is a great way of hammering out the exact contours of the standards that govern the common project...
No, we (the companies) don't.
We work to get web features that we can leverage.
If we can get away with them being adopted by everybody but solely controlled by us, it's all the merrier. If we can get away with keeping some features to ourselves as a competitive advantage ditto.
If we can push our agenda and standards instead of collaborating and iterating faster on common ones, that's great too.
We (the companies) could care less about the web, in any way in which it doesn't affect our bottom line.
In fact, if we have to stall the Web's progress to protect some of our own investments and offerings, we're all for it.
Also, if we have to stall the Web's progress just to avoid some competitor getting his stuff adopted and standardized first, we're all for it.
Well, it's not like I haven't added the notice "(the companies)" after "we" twice.
By which "companies" (something also clear from the context), I mean Apple, MS, Google etc, the companies working on rendering engines and browser.
I used "we" to adopt the parent comment's use of "we" and his idea of the web as a common project all those companies share.
>so I can take great care to avoid ever working for them.
Well, since you already work for Google, it's understandable you seeing this as silly and thinking they are all for open and the web's progress.
I don't think that's the general perception people have of Google though -- nor that it is correct.
"We're doing our own thing that we totally control and will likely only show up in our products"
is better than
"We're contributing to one of the best/most successful opensource projects around and thereby making the web better for people across devices and platforms".
for anyone other than Google.
WhatWG was formed because the W3C design by committee approach was too slow for some businesses to gain an advantage.
W3C is a paid up list of various exchange top 500 companies who can afford to pay up for standards.
It's a giant pissing match.
Edit: I didn't know I replied to a Google employee, just s/Google/your company/ in my post.
> But ask yourself, now, what if Apple decided that for
> being competitive with Google they must do the same
> thing and ditch everything that don't suit to their
> plans?
Looking back, Apple's choice to go their own way was obviously beneficial both for themselves and for the web in general.
* Trident might not even exist if not for the significant competition (or the name might not be the same were history changed).
I remember they contributed back to the KHTML project by releasing a patch. Do your employer plan to release a patch back to Webkit? And you also seem to forget that back then there wasn't as many small vendors as there are today. Gecko never was much used outside of Mozilla, which is of course very different for Webkit.
all you have to look at is the history of html5 and even the issues surrounding things like video to see what its like to decide by committee.
WHATWG published the First Public Working Draft of the specification on 22 January 2008
In May 2011, the working group advanced HTML5 to "Last Call
As of May 2012, the specification is back to Working Draft state at the W3C
In September 2012, the W3C proposed a plan[28] to release a stable HTML5 Recommendation by the end of 2014