The W3C still hosts the home page of a Web standards group whose future did not happen.
Visit the archived XHTML2 Working Group page
The page belonged to the XHTML2 Working Group, chartered in 2007 and closed in 2010. The W3C now labels the page as a historical archive and points current visitors toward HTML5 material, but the old working-group site itself remains intact.
That means the abandoned path is still documented in its own words.
The page contains news posts, specifications, public drafts, issue links, test suites, tutorials, slides, validation material, translations, meeting information and the group’s charter. It explains XHTML as an XML-based successor to HTML and lays out the modular approach the group expected to support everything from mobile devices to forms, mathematics, vector graphics and richer structured data.
The branch that lost
The most interesting line is dated July 2, 2009. The W3C announced that the XHTML2 Working Group charter would not be renewed and that resources would instead be increased for HTML5.
You can read that decision today while standing inside the site of the technology being wound down.
The archive preserves a lot more than XHTML2 itself. It links XHTML 1.0, XHTML Basic, XHTML 1.1, XHTML Modularization, XML Events, RDFa work and earlier HTML standards. There is even a compact history of HTML 4.0, HTML 3.2 and HTML 2.0.
For developers who arrived after HTML5 became the obvious center of gravity, this page is useful because standards history looks much cleaner in hindsight than it felt while it was happening. There were competing assumptions about how strict markup should become, how XML should fit into the Web, how devices with tiny memory budgets should consume documents and how future languages ought to be assembled from modules.
The site also demonstrates something the W3C has generally done well: old standards material remains linkable. A specification can be obsolete without being erased.
That matters. Technical history becomes much harder to reconstruct when the only surviving explanation of a failed idea is somebody else’s retrospective summary.
Here the drafts, announcements and vocabulary are still sitting on the original server.
The future changed direction. The directory stayed put.