Forking the Web: The WHATWG Rebellion and the Birth of HTML5
How Browser Makers Defied the Standards Body to Build the Modern Web

About this book:

The internet you use every day—streaming video without plugins, apps that work offline, websites that fit your phone—was not inevitable. It was won in a covert war between browser makers and the standards body that claimed to own the web. In 2004, the W3C voted to kill HTML for a pristine, theoretical successor that would have broken every existing site. Rather than comply, engineers from Opera, Mozilla, and Apple did the unthinkable: they forked the standard, founded the WHATWG in secret, and began writing HTML5 themselves.

*Forking the Web* pulls back the curtain on the mailing lists, IRC channels, and backroom deals where the modern web was forged. You'll watch Ian Hickson almost single-handedly author a "living standard" while browser vendors reverse-engineered each other's quirks into spec. You'll see Apple smuggle `<canvas>` into the wild, Google throw its weight behind the insurgency, and the W3C eventually surrender—rechartering HTML on the rebels' terms. It is a story of pragmatic code triumphing over academic purity, and of an open platform surviving the oligarchies of Flash, Silverlight, and Internet Explorer 6.

Meticulously researched and vividly told, this is the definitive history of the coup that saved the open web. For developers, historians, and anyone who builds on the platform, *Forking the Web* reveals how the most critical infrastructure of the 21st century was not handed down from a cathedral—but hammered out in the bazaar, one hard-won commit at a time.