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The company will have three representatives in the working group, including Dave Hyatt, the lead developer for Safari and WebKit. It is also increasing its participation in other W3C Working Groups and standards bodies related to Web technology.

The HTML Working Group was set up earlier this month, but does not expect to deliver the new specification until 2010.

Apple's contribution should be quite significant, given that its WebKit project has independently developed a number of extensions to HTML that enable additional OS X-specific features for applications

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such Dashboard widgets.

The WebKit team has already had an impact on proceedings, prompting an alteration of W3C's Success Criteria, which it claims would have 'effectively given Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer veto power over the spec'. The amended charter's success criteria no longer stipulate implementation of the new specification in browsers with minimum 10 per cent market share.

As WebKit's maciej notes, generally there have only ever been at most two browsers above this market share threshold, and for a while just one, Internet Explorer, arguably the least standards-compliant.

'Furthermore, we believe that even if all browsers besides IE conformed to the spec, it would still be a huge success and a huge benefit to web compatibility,' he says.

The working group's charter now stipulates that the it will be considered a success if there are 'multiple independent complete and interoperable implementations' of the new specification.