&gt; specs are not laws until they&#x27;re candidate recommendations<p>To be pedantic; web specs are (almost) never laws (occasionally some specs for e.g. a11y are incorporated by reference into other laws, but that typically doesn&#x27;t affect implementors). This is more important than it sounds because people are occasionally confused into thinking that if they can get something written down in a spec and drive the spec through the W3C process people will somehow be forced to implement it.<p>Even for specs that are implemented, the phases of the W3C process are actually mostly meaningless formalisms, and other bodies (e.g. WHATWG) work well without them. In practice a spec becomes &quot;law&quot; — i.e. immune from backwards incompatible changes — when there is enough content that depends on the existing behaviour that vendors won&#x27;t unship it. For most cases this is more or less when there are two compatible implementations shipping, although of course the details very on a case-by-case basis.