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The Abdication of the HTML Standard
GMGruman writes "The end of numbering for HTML versions beyond HTML5 hides two painful realities, argues Neil McAllister. One is that the HTML standards process has failed, becoming a seemingly never-ending bureaucratic maze that has encouraged the proliferation of draft implementations. That's not great, but as all the wireless draft standards have shown, it can be managed. But the bigger problem is that HTML has effectively been abandoned to four companies: Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla. They are deciding the actual fate of HTML, not a truly independent standards process."
Every place that I have ever worked had some wanker who was always running everyone else's code through some compliance checker/validator. Since 1996 I have never once been presented with a bug induced by non-compliant HTML(as opposed to simply broken). The major browsers just don't give a crap what you feed them. I have dutifully explained to each of these wankers as I kicked them off my project that our goal is to produce a working maintainable product not keep some academic happy in some remote corner of the internet.
Personally I will code to whatever standard works on the big three browsers and then move on. It could be called HTML Poop for all I care.
On top of that the W3C documents are all unreadable as a programming resource.
PS the only code validator should check for the "blink" tag.