W3C, WHAT-WG and Forms confusion

And what about this? 

http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-22_11-5582181.html

My next assignment (beggining next week) is precisely to build a
data-entry web-enabled kind of form to a allready existing database
application. I aim to keep this form completly independent on the
database application and the database itself by introducing a XML
level betwen the form and the app/db, so i can use XSLT on the client
and some kind of servlet-like technology on the server.

But with such a confusion, where should i start looking?