The WHAT WG may have had something to do with this. Reinventing HTML by Tim Berners-Lee was published on October 27, 2006. [Significance note: He founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1994.]
He cites others, too.
“Daniel Glazman, Björn Hörmann, Molly Holzschlag, Eric Meyer, and Jeffrey Zeldman and others have shared concerns about W3C works particularly in the HTML area.”
It’s a monumental article. The W3C will be reinventing HTML. That’s interesting. And, unexpected. Especially,
“The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group. Unlike the previous one, this one will be chartered to do incremental improvements to HTML, as also in parallel xHTML. It will have a different chair and staff contact. It will work on HTML and xHTML together. We have strong support for this group, from many people we have talked to, including browser makers.”
Further,
“There is also a plan for a separate group to work on the XHTML2 work which the old "HTML working group" was working on. There will be no dependency of HTML work on the XHTML2 work.”
[Acknowledgment note: Victory: new HTML WG by Anne van Kesteren (28 October 2006) was read first.]
[Published date: 28 October 2006]