I just left this comment at We Need Another W3C. by @baekdal: 

2022 doesn’t matter. It won’t be a recommendation by then or ever.

There is already a competitor to the W3C – it is the WHATWG, which started HTML5 by its own. They estimate a final spec by… wait for it… 2022. They are browser vendors who implement that stuff. There is an process of building a spec while implementing it, that’s why we can use HTML5 today and it just works, is backwards compatible and future proof.

The W3C picking up on the process is a good thing, as it has the authority. But in essence the HTML5 WG (and the WHATWG) are a discussion board where new standards are discussed and browser vendors agree on various things.

Compare that to HTML4, there were only a dozen people involved, no browsers, that anything of it was implemented is a miracle. It was forced upon browsers. With HTML5 there are about 600 people involved, it is more diverse. Then, after having really bad specs with HTML4 (missing error handling and such) and CSS2 (which later resulted in CSS2.1 which is still no recommendation – although you are using it here, too), the W3C made it harder for specifications to become final. The spec doesn’t change from 2012 on (according to the schedule above) to 2022, it just gets tested in full, which takes time but doesn’t stop us from using it.

Then, HTML5 is built to be a “semantic dynamic web app language” at it’s core, but the current spec just begins the transformation. We will see many additions in the next few years (HTML5 will evolute instead of being replaced by HTML6 or something) which will go further into the direction of web apps. It is important to get the foundation right, to built up from there. We can’t revolutionize the web from today to tomorrow. The W3C tried this w/ its attempt to create XHTML2, and failed.

Source: baekdal.com