“After sixteen years of working in parallel to the traditional
standards infrastructure, the World Wide Web Consortium has taken
an interesting decision: to begin submitting selected W3C
Recommendations to that same system for endorsement. In doing so,
it joins the small handful of consortia (seven, to be exact) that
have applied for this option out of the hundreds of consortia
currently active in the information and communications (ICT) to
apply for that option.“If this process sounds vaguely familiar, that’s likely because
this is the same process that OASIS used to gain global endorsement
of its OpenDocument Format (ODF). Microsoft took a similar, but
procedurally distinct, route with OOXML, its competing document
format, when it offered it to ECMA, which enjoys a special “Fast
Track” relationship with JTC1. What won’t sound familiar is the
conditions that the W3C has successfully included in its
application to make submissions, on which more below.”