As far as I understand, they (the W3C) do this every few months in an attempt to wrest defacto control of HTML back from WHATWG. They copy the WHATWG spec, strip out the licensing and authorship information, and publish as "their" HTML spec.
Then a few months passes, their copy falls behind the actively edited WHATWG one, so they have to fork it again. And so on, and so on.
It's really pretty pathetic.
So for the most part, changes get made in the WHATWG spec, they get copied to the W3C one, the W3C then stops copying additions at a certain point (say, when HTML 5.0 is considered 'complete') and then moves onto version 5.1. So version 5.1 is basically all the WHATWG additions that didn't make it into 5.0 before the spec was 'finalised', along with various changes made because the two groups don't get along with each other too well.
Who has this much arrogance?
This isn't the 1980s there aren't a few hundred developers playing around on spare university machines here.
This spec is one of the most expensive documents in the world.
I'd be suprised if tens of billions of dollars hasn't been lost because of just HTML 5 nevermind its predecessors.
HTML 5 affects - the cost of computers: having to buy better ones as it hogs more ram and cpu - the accessibility of the internet as swathes of poorer users are cut off from websites that don't support their mobile phones or won't load on their internet speeds - the accesibility of millions more who can't browse on internet enabled devices (internet enabled TVs, unupgradeable phones, etc) - the accessibility of websites as screenreaders stop working - the huge cost of development as web developers have to skill-up - the stresses on developers and businesses who don't want to have to re-develop their work again and again and again and again - the monopolies that run in the internet as development of alternative browsers for - the backwards compatibility conundrum: we've nearly got rid of the pervasiveness of of the HTML4 only browsers - the cost to the environment (this is serious: mobile devices use some pretty horrible rare metals, they use energy and they aren't easy to dispose, so if you have to upgrade it's not good) - the list goes on ...
So the goal should pretty much be perfection, because at the costs involved good simply isn't good enough
If that is too much, then modularise the specs, delegate the work into manageable specs and if you've not got a spare billion lying around to develop it, then find it because this spec needs to be awesome.
Failing that, since HTML started: the Linux community realised that X11 isn't good enough; Microsoft canned its UI framework (or three of them?), Apple and Google brought in new Mobile UI frameworks and also, J2ME and Symbian largely disappeared: it might be time for us to consider deprecating HTML and finding a more appropriate body capable of creating a better web language.
See also the FAQ: https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#What_does_.22Living_Standar...
And this quote by Hixie: "You know what will be around ten years from now by looking at what is implemented in two browsers today. If it’s implemented in two browsers today, I can almost guarantee it’ll still be around in ten years. If it’s not, all bets are off. This has nothing to do with “living standard” vs. versioned specs, though. HTML4 has all kinds of features that aren’t in HTML anymore — for example, <object declare> and <a coords>." (http://html5doctor.com/interview-with-ian-hickson-html-edito...)
My translation: HTML is an evolutionary dead end, and because it's so large it won't die in our lifetime.
