Now the W3C is meddling with Atom by wanting it to become an official W3C spec instead of an IETF draft. I find things like references to how well the Atom group built consensus in the community embarrassing—anyone who followed Atom's development even a little knows that much of this has nothing to do with consensus, but simply with the fact that some people spend more time on it than others and apparently have nothing important to do—and just push through their ideas via relentless siege tactics. The loudest mouths also like to resort to falsifying history and lies just to take a shot at their competitor RSS. Of course, this is answered accordingly by the equally obtuse loudest proponents of RSS. A lovely mud-slinging match with no real value for users.
Anyone who now thinks this exactly reflects the development of HTML back when HTML was still an IETF draft, and believes that the corresponding people deserve nothing more than having their spec end up as a standard at the W3C, has understood the point.
On Workbench you can find the original article.