Literally the WHATWG founders wanted to focus on web applications, which they said web authors were asking for, and they got voted down.

Google was not involved in the founding of WHATWG, though certainly the WHATWG vision was better aligned with Google than with what the W3C was doing.

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xg15 5 hours ago | parent [-]

They only paid the salary of its chief editor (Ian Hickson) for a significant amount of time...

But that's not very relevant actually. The WHATWG is more like a private arbitrator, not like a court or parliament.

Their mission is to document browser features and coordinate them in such a way that implementation between browsers doesn't diverge too much. It's NOT their mission to decide which features will or will not be implemented or even to design new features. That's left to the browser vendors.

And the most powerful browser vendor is Google.

	▲	dpark 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is such a bizarre response to me saying Google was not part of the founding WHATWG group. It’s like you want to have an argument but don’t have anything to argue about. “Oh, yeah? Well they paid Hickson’s salary. And the WHATWG doesn’t matter anyway. And also Google is really powerful.” Um, ok. WHATWG was founded in 2004 by Mozilla, Opera, and Apple. Google had no browser at that point and didn’t hire Ian Hickson until 2005. Google is currently a WHATWG member and clearly wields a great deal of influence there. And yeah, the 4 trillion dollar internet giant is powerful. No argument there.