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A comment on Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”?. Parent comment

Re:Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”? by jordanb on Sunday December 01, 2013 @04:57PM (#6829564)
This is an interesting perspective. I always loved the "Joke" RFCs from the earlier days of the IETF. It's sad to see the organization get away from that ethos.

What are your thoughts on the W3C? It seems like they spent the early 2000s going down the path you describe with XHTML, but with HTML5, they've rediscovered "rough consensus and working code," albeit driven entirely by the big browser vendors.

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Re:Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”? by icebraining on Sunday December 01, 2013 @06:33PM (#6830012)
Take my uninformed opinion with a massive grain of salt, but it seems to me that the W3C is mostly glad to leave the HTML5 nonsense to the WHATWG while they work on the stuff they really care about, such as the Semantic Web.
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Re:Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”? by sgtpepper on Sunday December 01, 2013 @07:38PM (#6830341)
Why "loved" in the past tense? There are new joke RFCs every year: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6921.txt
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Re:Why are Internet standards called “Request for Comments”? by plorkyeran on Sunday December 01, 2013 @08:08PM (#6830487)
HTML5 is the product of WHATWG, which was specifically created to work around the fact that the W3C was trying its hardest to be utterly irrelevant.

> The WHATWG was founded by individuals of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software in 2004, after a W3C workshop. Apple, Mozilla and Opera were becoming increasingly concerned about the W3C’s direction with XHTML, lack of interest in HTML and apparent disregard for the needs of real-world authors.

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