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This page exists to document the status of the outdated forks of various WHATWG specifications, and any progress toward clarifying their out-of-dateness.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

Confusion Somewhat Mitigated

• URL: https://url.spec.whatwg.org/
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/url/ plus various aliases and older versions
  • Status: has a reasonable red disclaimer, but still exists.
  • Also, https://w3ctag.github.io/url/ exists without the disclaimer.
• Streams: https://streams.spec.whatwg.org/
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/streams-api/
  • Status: mostly gutted, with a reasonable red disclaimer.

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  • Status: still exists as an outdated specification with no warning, causing confusion.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/
  • Status: still exists as an outdated snapshot with no warning, causing confusion. And has a weird rename ("DOM4") too.
• Encoding: https://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/encoding/
  • Status: still exists as an outdated snapshot with no warning, causing confusion
• 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  • Status: still exists as an outdated snapshot with no warning, causing confusion. The spec model has diverged significantly in the meantime, and the outdated version is actively wrong, not just incomplete.
• XMLHttpRequest: https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest2/
  • Status: Although XHR "level 2" has been discontinued as a NOTE, XHR "level 1" continues to exist as an outdated snapshot with no warning, causing confusion. The spec is not properly layered on top of the Fetch Standard, either, which means it fails to integrate with the rest of the platform (e.g. it is not intercepted by service workers, according to the fork).
• 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  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/ as an outdated fork of a subset frozen in 2013.
  • Forked to http://www.w3.org/TR/html51/ as an outdated fork of a subset frozen in 2015.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/
    • http://www.w3.org/TR/eventsource/
    • http://www.w3.org/TR/2dcontext/