Licences of WHATWG/W3C specifications

[admin]

Several days ago I noticed that https://www.w3.org/TR/dom/ redirects to https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/. Similarly, https://www.w3.org/TR/html/ goes to https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/. The reason is the agreement between WHATWG and W3C described here:

https://www.w3.org/2019/04/WHATWG-W3C-MOU.html

One consequence of this move is that, in principle, the 'official' source for DOM and HTML is available under a Creative Commons licence, which is different to the W3C licence that used to apply. The DOM-derived interface declarations in CSS4J carry the W3C licence despite the fact that I support the idea that APIs are not copyrightable (but keep the copyrights for attribution purposes).

At this moment I'm not changing the licencing of the W3C-derived interfaces, but keep watching the situation. Implications are more serious for the code or pseudo-code present in some W3C standards, as the current status makes it basically unusable (they imply a specific licencing for the implementation that reproduces them). The CSS colour system conversions are affected by this, for example.

Hopefully the W3C specifications shall move to a less restrictive licencing, at least if they want their pseudo-code (or example code snippets) to be used safely.