Shelley Powers (http://shelleypowers.burningbird.net/about), who is quoted in the post, has worked in the industry for decades, has written several O’Reilly books about Web technologies, and used to be highly critical of the way HTML standards development has gone. (Yeah, and now she’s on the HTML WG. Veterans of volunteer organizations should be familiar with the “OK, if you think we’re doing everything wrong, you can join us on the committee” gambit.)
If she says Adobe is not to blame, Adobe is not to blame.
Mark Pilgrim, who is not quoted in the post, has worked in the industry for a decade, has written several books about web technologies and remains highly critical of the way HTML standards development has gone. He says Adobe is to blame.
Shelley Powers has tried to block the HTML5 standards process using procedural objections, long pointless process discussions, and personal attacks on the editor of the HTML5 standard, more than anyone else that I've seen, at least for the past year or two that I've been following the W3C side of the HTML5 process. I'm not sure she's the best person to reference when trying to defend people who are trying to put up procedural roadblocks to publishing the HTML5 working draft.
Larry Masinter is also a veteran of web standards. He seems to be the sort of person who thinks that standards purity, procedural issues, and the like are more important than actual, real world, shipping, interoperable implementations. "<masinter> well, I'm not sure 'matches reality' is always the most important goal" from http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20090922
So, I do not know if he is trying to slow down the HTML5 standards process because he is employed by Adobe and they consider it in their best interest to slow the process down, or if it's merely because he's an architecture astronaut standards wonk who truly believes that objections claiming that canvas is out of scope of the HTML working group and that it would be better served by splitting it off into some other (currently unspecified) committee. I will note that the W3C HTML working group was chartered with canvas present in the working draft it adopted from the WHATWG, and the only reason it is being split into a separate specification is because of more procedural objections from the very same parties who seem to be opposing any innovation that came from the WHATWG and browser vendors.
It's probably worth reading the quote in full, and recalling that Shelley's been party to a number of high-profile feuds involving the person she's going after in the quote. So I wouldn't exactly rate it as a neutral quote, and for this post to present it as such is a bit disingenuous.
Personally, I think the whole thing reeks of stupid standards-committee politics from all sides. Adobe, judging from what they've posted publicly, decided to play up technicalities and procedural issues to try to kill or hold up a competitor to Flash, and the WG chairs responded by publicly alluding to private discussions and painting it to look as bad as possible.
If she says Adobe is not to blame, Adobe is not to blame.