World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry group responsible for overseeing the development of web standards, has revealed that it has given a recommendation status to hyper-text markup language version 5 (HTML5) – a status that equates to complete and finalized specification in layman’s terms.
Users won’t be noticing any changes as most of the browsers already support most of the HTML5 features unless they are using really old browsers. HTML5 brings a lot many new features on the table including the
The path to HTML5 hasn’t been a smooth one as you will continue to find out below. As far as controversial and non-interoperable features are concerned, they have been moved to HTML 5.1 and the working group will continue working on them with an expected rollout timeframe of early next year.
The History
HTML5 has been in a state of flux ever since quite a few years and with W3C concentrating on XHTML since after the release of HTML 4.1, WHATWG – a group of companies that broke away to work on a standard that actually looking into requirements of the web and developers and matched them.
While W3C was busy working on XHTML, WHATWG went about working on the initial specifications of HTML5 on its own and laid the groundwork for the standard. However, there is a fundamental difference in the approach of the two groups as far as development of standards in general is concerned. On one hand WHATWG doesn’t stick with versioning as it dubs its process as a work in progress and an evolving one and on the other hand W3C goes about freezing version numbers.
In a bid to ensure that the difference of methodologies do not affect development of HTML5 W3C took the work done by WHATWG as the base, but hasn’t referenced their work directly.
The latest major version comes after 15 years – the previous major version HTML 4.1 was signed off in 1999.
