Fork tracking

This page exists to document the status of the outdated forks of various WHATWG specifications, and any progress toward clarifying their out-of-dateness.

Confusion persists

• Fetch: https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org/
  • Obsolete subsections published as http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/
  • Status: still exists as an outdated specification with no warning, causing confusion.
• DOM: https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/dom/
  • Forked to https://w3c.github.io/dom/
  • Status: still exists as an outdated snapshot (and modified in undocumented ways) with no warning, causing confusion. And has a weird rename ("DOM4") too. Editors draft has renewed forking efforts with particularly bad copy-and-paste practices.
• XMLHttpRequest: https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/
  • A subset was forked to https://www.w3.org/TR/progress-events/. (ED redirects)
• Notifications: https://notifications.spec.whatwg.org/
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/notifications/
  • Status: still exists as an outdated snapshot with no warning, causing confusion. The spec model has diverged significantly in the meantime, and the outdated version is actively wrong, not just incomplete.
• HTML: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/ as an outdated fork of a subset frozen in 2013.
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/html51/ as an outdated fork of a subset frozen in 2015.
  • Forked to https://w3c.github.io/html/ as an outdated fork of a subset frozen in early 2016 (see blog post).
  • In general all of these attempt to copy-and-paste HTML and then apply forked patches on top, but the scripts are wonky, leading to lots of errors.
  • Subsets of HTML split out into other outdated forks, none with appropriate warnings:
    • http://www.w3.org/TR/webstorage/
    • http://www.w3.org/TR/workers/
    • http://www.w3.org/TR/webmessaging/ (ED is nice at least https://w3c.github.io/webmessaging/)
    • http://www.w3.org/TR/websockets/ (ED is nice at least https://w3c.github.io/websockets/)
    • http://www.w3.org/TR/eventsource/ (ED is nice at least https://w3c.github.io/eventsource/)
    • http://www.w3.org/TR/2dcontext/
    • https://www.w3.org/TR/2dcontext2/
    • https://www.w3.org/TR/microdata/ (published as NOTE, but still contains a bunch of outdated content)

Confusion persists with some mitigation

• Encoding: https://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/encoding/
  • Status: still exists as an outdated snapshot, with a floating notice that it's an outdated snapshot at the bottom, but pretending that it provides a "stable reference"

Confusion mitigated

• Fullscreen: https://fullscreen.spec.whatwg.org/
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/fullscreen/
  • Status: discontinued as a NOTE. ED URL (http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/fullscreen/raw-file/tip/Overview.html) redirects
• Streams: https://streams.spec.whatwg.org/
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/streams-api/
  • Status: discontinued as NOTE. ED URL is WHATWG URL, former ED URL (http://w3c.github.io/streams-api/) redirects
• XMLHttpRequest: https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest2/
  • Status: both /TR/ forks discontinued as NOTEs. ED URLs are to WHATWG XHR, former ED URL https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/xhr/raw-file/default/xhr-1/Overview.html redirects.
• URL: https://url.spec.whatwg.org/
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/url/ plus various aliases and older versions (e.g. https://www.w3.org/TR/url-1/)
  • Status: discontinued as NOTE, ED URL is WHATWG URL, former ED URL http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/url/raw-file/tip/Overview.html redirects.
  • https://w3ctag.github.io/url/ has also been fully discontinued.