Ryan Roberts

In defense of HTML 5 and that 2022 date

HTML 5 has been getting a lot of focus lately, especially the 2022 date of when it will apparently be ready.

I’ve considering writing about this for a while now but today Ian Hickson (HTML 5 editor) posted a comment on Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog that for me pretty much clears up the matter:

I’ve mentioned 2022 as a date I hope to see two complete and bug free implementations of all of HTML5 in various articles, but I wasn’t aware of one where I was quoted as actually saying it’d only be ready by then. The plan is to have it more or less “ready” by October this year. (We’ve never had two complete and bug free implementations of any Web spec before as far as I know, so 2022 is pretty optimistic in a way.)

Sounds much better don’t you think? Pretty much ready by the end of 2009.

Let’s just get this straight — last call working draft is planned for October 2009, Candidate Recommendation status is set for 2012 and then the Proposed Recommendation should appear around 2022. In-between 2012 and 2022 browser vendors will implement the Proposed Recommendation and (hopefully) providing feedback to further refine the spec. The WHATWG will work on detailed test suites (or I presume it will be them) so browser vendors can aim for that “complete and bug free implementation”. But as Hixie says this hasn’t been done before so 2022 isn’t such a crazy date.

Over the next few years we should expect to get increased support for and use out of HTML 5, certainly far in advance of 2022… In fact you can start using HTML 5 today if you like.

You can find out more about HTML 5 including the time-line in this Tech Republic interview with Ian Hickson.

W3C to drop XHTML 2 in favour of HTML 5

XHTML 2 Working Group Expected to Stop Work End of 2009, W3C to Increase Resources on HTML 5

The W3C announced yesterday that they plan to allow the XHTML 2 Working Group charter to expire and put the remaining available resources into developing HTML 5.

It also appears the W3C plan to leave XHTML 1.* where it is and end further development, again in favour of HTML 5:

The expectation is that HTML 5 will define the next generation XML serialization of HTML. Therefore, W3C does not at this time plan to allocate resources to the maintenance of XHTML 1.1, XHTML 1.1 Basic, and XHTML Print beyond the current round of revisions. W3C does not plan to revise the XHTML 1.0 Recommendation.

Unsurprisingly for some I am pleased to see this happen. Thanks to lack of support from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer proper XHTML was little more than a myth. Furthmore XHTML 2 was never really going anywhere, HTML 5 is already being implemented by browser vendors and some developers have started using it in their work.