Note from the future (Oct 20, 2025): I just opened my editor and found this half-written draft. Might as well publish it.

It’s a bit awkward that I haven’t blogged in some 19 months so, as owner and author of the best blog about broken websites on the internet. I guess I’ve been busy, or lacking motivation to write, or perhaps both. Who can really say.

But this morning I was just sitting at a table on the 5th floor of the extremely under construction Hilton Anaheim (location of the 2024 W3C TPAC) telling Dom Farolino about the origin of the WHATWG Compat Standard logo.

Today, it lives at https://resources.whatwg.org/logo-compat.svg. If you check out the source, you should see something like:

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 100 100">
  <rect width="90"
        height="90"
        fill="#fff"
        x="5"
        y="5"
        stroke="#3c790a"
        stroke-width="10"
        style="-webkit-border-radius: 10px"/>
  <path d="(omitted)" fill="#3c790a"/>
</svg>

There’s clearly a hilarious joke in the inline style. Please clap.

If you dig into the history of the spec, though, you’ll notice Karl Dubost’s first stab at the logo as the repo’s first commit. Which is certainly one way to begin the commit history of a nascent standard. Thankfully that version only lasted a day, and a little more than a week later that was replaced by the current square logo.