intertwingly

Two significant events happened this week in the portions of the W3C where I happen to frequent.

First, the HTML Working Group published a new Working Draft.  Mark Pilgrim published a excellent overview of the changes.  This wasn’t exactly an uncontentious event, it included first resolving 5 separate issues and then resolving whether or not to include issue markers in the published draft.  The initial decision on that final question was to NOT include issue markers, but if you look closely issue markers are present as the problem that people had with issues markers themselves was addressed, due in part to a first installment of a cleanup of the issues list itself by Maciej and by the automation of the inclusion of issue markers done by James Graham.  Ian adopted the approach and Manu approved of the results.

Second, Chris Wilson stepped down as co-chair, and was immediately replaced by Paul Cotton of Microsoft and Maciej Stachowiak of Apple.  I hope I last as long as Chris did, and look forward to working with Paul and Maciej.

Pivotal issues include ARIA, Canvas Accessibility, RDFa and Distributed Extensibility.  Normative Language Reference and HTML Versioning are potential sleeper items, the former is essentially an epistemological question, and the TAG is on the case for the latter one.

A lot of people are working hard to get to the point where we hopefully can have a Last Call this year with the prior concurrence not only the WHATWG, but also including Microsoft and the related Working Groups inside of the W3C including the WAI and SW communities.