The manner in which Web standards are developed today is often daunting to newcomers, most notably to Web developers whose input is sorely needed in order to build a better Web.

The goal of this project is to fix this. The Web development community, and open source people in general, have over time developed work modes that are highly effective and can sustain both high quality and openness to contributions. There is no reason why such methods cannot be applied to open standards just as well, and that is what we endeavour to do.

Web developers create most of the Web’s magic, yet they are almost absent from the process of creation of core Web technology. Web standards suffer sorely from Web developers’ absence; yet, at this time, contributing to standards remains unnecessarily daunting. Web Platform Specs — or “WebSpecs” for short — aims to progressively build up both the technical solution and the community involvement to address this issue.

Now we have two documents, WHATWAG/W3C and Web Platform Specs which slightly differ (second use railroad diagrams for parser). It's a bit confusing, I don't know which version is more recent and more forward-looking.