DRAFT W3C/WHATWG Relationship update

This document is an update of the Memorandum of Understanding Between W3C and WHATWG, entered May 28, 2019 (“MOU”).

WHEREAS, W3C and WHATWG have been working together collaboratively under the terms of the May 28 MOU;

THEREFORE, W3C and WHATWG wish to memorialize certain additional agreements. To the extent these terms differ from the MOU, the terms below supersede.

In response to inquiries in the collaborative relationship, WHATWG plans to institute a policy to welcome contributions from persons who, for various reasons, are unable to sign the Contributor and Workstream Participant Agreement as an Entity or as an Individual; such persons can now request to be invited.

W3C will transfer the development of the WebIDL specification to WHATWG, where it will be published as a WHATWG specification. Similar to the HTML and DOM specifications, WebIDL will be developed principally in the WHATWG, following the WHATWG Working Mode and, in the event of disagreement, the collaboration process shall be followed. This collaboration will enable proper maintenance of the specification and support W3C Working Groups that depend on the WebIDL language to describe their APIs. W3C will discontinue any specification release plans for WebIDL, as the WebIDL editors are committed to address issues and resolve pull requests raised by W3C Groups. W3C and WHATWG will continue jointly developing tools to support the WebIDL specification.

WHATWG will integrate the W3C specifications on HTML Media Capture, worklets, resource hints, preload, Media Playback Capture in the HTML and DOM specifications. The objective is to consolidate the specification of the elements in the HTML specification rather than having the definition and the specification of the behavior in different documents.

Parties agree to extend the scope of the collaboration process to include:

1. Specifications that have been newly split from the HTML and DOM specifications, with advance notification to the WHATWG Steering Group;
2. The Fetch specification (a successor to the CORS specification); and
3. The WebIDL specification.

W3C shall have the ability, but not the obligation, to endorse these specifications as W3C Recommendations, following the process of §§3-5 in the original MOU (in alternate working groups as necessary).

Future agreements relating to deliverables to be moved or copied between the parties will be recorded in https://github.com/w3c/whatwg-coord.