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It's Official: HTML5 Is a W3C Standard
rjmarvin (3001897) writes The Worldwide Web Consortium today has elevated the HTML5 specification to 'recommendation' status , giving it the group's highest level of endorsement, which is akin to becoming a standard. The W3C also introduced Application Foundations with the announcement of the HTML5 recommendation to aid developers in writing Web applications, and said the organization is working with patents holders of the H.264 codec to agree on a baseline royalty-free interoperability level commitment.
Turning de facto standards that have been implemented in actual browsers into a formal specification is how standards work best.
Coming up with a specification first and hoping someone will be able to implement it is how we wound up with Perl 6.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Please show an example where Microsoft sat on a standards body and then patented something regarding that spec, because as much as you'd like to believe this is true, it simply isn't. You have this backwards. Microsoft often had patents relating to things they sat on a standards body for (much like everyone else on that committee), and in most cases had already implemented a version of it before the committee was formed, let alone ratified anything. In some cases, they implemented something that was being discussed prior to ratification (which takes years), and then the standards body changed their minds and made changes to the standard before ratifying it. And in other cases, Microsoft implemented functionality that was already prevalent in the marketplace (another companies work -- usually netscape), and the standards body came up with a different, incompatible solution to the same thing.
If you have an example (any example) of what you say, I'd like to hear it, because I've never found any evidence of it, yet.