Lady, EVOLVED 
web standardization history
remember when W3C leaned too hard into user-centric design and modularity and new X·M·L technologies
and Brendan Eich, noted homophobe, grew concerned with this, not because of its impact to ordinary people, but because he thought that monolithic web browsers manufacturers would wind up losing out to newer, bespoke applications
and so he got Mozilla and Opera together to write a letter saying that the future of computing on the web should take place entirely within the web browser using nothing but HTML, CSS, and a whole lot of Javascript (a language he created)
and they forked HTML from W3C, setting up WHATWG, an organization controlled entirely by web browser implementors, to decide the future of the web going forward
and then Mozilla used the fact that they were “the only nonprofit with a seat at the table of standardization organizations” in their fundraising campaigns for the next decade
web standardization history
@Lady@glitch.cat.family That's an interesting point of view. The way it was told to me back in the day is that the big bad W3C didn't care about backwards compatibility and were inventing things no one asked for. So the grassroots knight in shining armor (the WHATWG) saved the day by simplifying HTML into HTML5.
I was too young when that happened so I don't really have an opinion, but thanks for the perspective.
web standardization history
mozilla didn’t just directly profit from a situation where only large browsers manufacturers had any say in the direction of the web, they actively created it