This position seems at odds with a recently opened WHATWG issue.
https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/4986
In Issue 914451: Autofill does not respect autocomplete="off"whatwg
html
HTML2015–2026
whatwg / html
html
HTML Standard
149Distinct people
217Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
9.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
HTML Standard
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
I tried to leave some details here on the situation downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12849375 As for actual technical differences, the vast majority of them are…
domenicd used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- mozilla/standards-positions · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- w3c/html · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:59:53 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year217 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-08-27 22:16:26 UTC to 2026-10-17 23:55:29 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 3 | 4 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 2 | 7 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 2 | 8 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 27 | 0 | 27 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 19 | 3 | 16 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 4 | 10 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 24 | 1 | 23 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 80 | 8 | 72 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 1 | 10 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
This repository hosts the HTML Standard.
Code of conduct
We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all. Please read and respect the WHATWG Code of Conduct.
Contribution opportunities
We appreciate all contributions, see the guidelines for contributing for details, including information on how to build HTML output from the source file so you can preview your changes locally.
Tests
Tests are in the html/ directory of the web-platform-tests repository.
Blame
As the source file is too large for GitHub's blame utility, use blame for source on searchfox instead.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
9 sourcesThere was a prior request to actually have a scoped CSS tag in the HTML+CSS standard[1], why aren't we seeing a stronger advocation for it if that's all people are looking for? I'm a small fish but I certainly would love to see this HTML spec be revived.
[1] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/552
In Building the New Twitter.comA few things that stand out:
* Enabled WebAuthN on macOS! - Web Authentication API on MDN [0]: "an extension of the Credential Management API that enables strong authentication with public key cryptography, enabling passwordless authentication and/or secure second-factor authentication without SMS texts." I think Safari was the last major holdout on this API, so this might be huge. Could anyone that has had experience with this API share any thoughts and experiences?
* `document.hasStorageAccess()` - Storage Access API on MDN [1]: "provides a way for embedded, cross-origin content to gain unrestricted access to storage that it would normally only have access to in a first-party context (we refer to this as an origin’s first-party storage)." The feature originated from Apple: Introducing Storage Access API [2]; it's still considered experi
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mental and is only supported by Firefox and Safari. Skimming through the related WHATWG HTML issue [3], the discussion seems worth reading if you're interested in a bit of the reasoning that goes into designing these APIs.
* `line-break: anywhere` - From Chrome Platform Status [4]: "allows soft wrapping around every typographic character unit, including around any punctuation character or preserved spaces, or in the middles of words."
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Authent...
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Storage_Acc...
[2] https://webkit.org/blog/8124/introducing-storage-access-api/
[3] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/3338
[4] https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5668660729348096
It's important to note, nobody's being forced to use custom components or new syntax by specification, though as deprecations occur it's possible based on usage statistics that services like Google or new browser security or performance improvements could affect your site. And speaking to XML for a sec, while XHTML's backwards compatibility problems could have been avoided by specifying some kind of graceful fallback instead of Firefox's red text on yellow (yikes!), the real point is that when specs are created now, there's more of an attempt to "see what sticks" than there used to be. It's funny because E4X was also a failure, but JSX is so popular today, go figure.
Re. specific examples mentioned:
CSP is still evolving today and HTML has to keep up -- https://github.com/whatwg/html/search?o=desc&q=CSP&s=author-...
With WeakRef, things s
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till need to stay up-to-date: https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/4571
I would say it's remarkable how many standards on the web apparently don't have anything to do with HTML.
I was speaking more generally about live standards, but if you want to focus specifically on the HTML spec and notable changes for newer devices and accessibility:
https://github.com/whatwg/html/commits
Let’s see, right off the top we’ve inputmode attr which helps support different keyboards on plain input text controls, we’ve enterkeyhint which lets you pick from a list of options for the enter key on virtual keyboards - both of these changes improve the usability and accessibility of the keyboard on newer touch screen devices. Form-associated custom elements let you create your own HTML elements that can participate in forms (the goal of custom elements is to help you build your own custom LEGO pieces instead of relying on the basic blocks the HTML spec includes — one could think of this as an eventual replacement of JSX components with
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HTML-based ones), autocomplete=one-time-code (thanks, iOS!), more granular control over file downloads, updating the spec to match reality (what browsers actually implemented for compatibility vs what was written in advance), srcset for retina (which reminds me, lazy loading images as a simple img tag attribute), WeakMap/WeakSet to help reduce memory leaks from stale DOM node references, requestAnimationFrame and other enhancements to the page lifecycle, CSP headers and related HTML attribute changes, and well, the list doesn’t end. ;-) For accessibility there’s the inert attribute that prevents focus to child content which is great if you need more flexibility than the dialog element provides by default but don’t want to get into setting tabindex manually or controlling all focus with JS, etc.
> it used to be based on SGML (though now it's not, for various reasons)
HTML doesn't cease to be based on SGML by mere declaration, or even by brittling it to the point it can't be parsed by any known formal standard. That's more a political stance, as in American isn't English or some such.
WHATWG's formulation of HTML has deliberately distanced itself from SGML out of ignorance and a desire to not being accountable or formally verifiable (aka move fast and break things) against established, rich theoretical foundations of markup languages. And it shows: already in a paper I published two years ago [1], I show flaws in HTML as described by WHATWG, some of which have since been fixed ([3]). Not only is the concept of "transparent markup" flawed and underspecified, it also has since be used in the definition of the content model for the d
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l element, and as an unintended consequence also the div element (cf [2]), flaws that could be easily avoided by just using SGML for the grammar WHATWG is attempting to describe when SGML has been around for ages.
It's also not entirely true that WHATWG HTML can parse all legacy docs. For example, the keygen element has been removed, and while not a terrible loss as such ;), since keygen is a void element (an element with declared content EMPTY in SGML parlance), its presence in a legacy document (eg without an end-element tag) will make HTML5 parsers fail hard ([4]). It's also completely unclear which version of HTML is being validated by eg. W3C's nu or another validator. Heck, even the spec text for WHATWG HTML itself reads
> This file is NOT HTML, it's a proprietary language that is then post-processed into HTML
when a large portion of the spec text portrays HTML in the role of an authoring language.
So tell me why, as an author, I should follow WHATWG's vision for HTML? As you say yourself, WHATWG hasn't advanced HTML the markup language at all, and has rather prevented the evolution of declarative UI features, to the effect of making JavaScript essential for all but the most basic documents.
[1]: http://archive.xmlprague.cz/2017/files/xmlprague-2017-procee...
[2]: https://github.com/w3c/html/issues/1116
[3]: https://github.com/whatwg/html/commit/6e305c457e42276bf275b8...
[4]: Edit: this affects differences introduced in HTML 5.2 vs HTML 5.1, not some distant archaic HTML 4 version
Web Proposal: Programmatic preloading of resources
3 points · Open discussionThe driving force behind this feature do seem to be a couple of Googlers, but at least one person from Mozilla and one from Apple have been involved in the discussion and contributed to the spec changes.
The changes have not been accepted into the spec, however, or even reviewed by W3C-TAG, so it isn't a standard yet.
You can find the full discussion here: https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/3752
In Native image lazy-loading for the webThe Dialog Element Will Probably Be Removed from the HTML Spec
1 points · Open discussion