The Emergence of HTML5

In the very same year, a group of enthusiastic people at the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software, the creators of Firefox and Opera browsers, tried to lobby for transforming XHTML into a standard that provides more development-oriented features. They intended to position the markup that was originally created for describing documents into a great tool for developing web applications, but they failed the W3C voting for this change.

With Apple, they established the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) within W3C. The most important goal of this group was to extend the existing HTML standard with developers in mind, while still keeping backwards compatibility. First, they worked on add-in specifications like Web Applications 1.0 and Web Forms 2.0.

In 2007, W3C indirectly admitted its failure when it disbanded the group working on XHTML2, and they commenced formalizing a new standard, HTML5, based on the work of WHATWG.

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While today W3C is responsible for the official HTML5, WHATWG have not stopped envisioning new HTML features. They imagine HTML as a living standard (visit http://developers.whatwg.org for details), and the markup itself as a living language.

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According to this vision, HTML pages won’t have a version number, and a previously created HTML page will never become obsolete. As time goes on and technology evolves, HTML will introduce new elements and support new features. It’s up to browser vendors and developers to choose whether they will use a certain new feature or not.

Although this “living thing” seems weird, just imagine how developers would respect a moving target as new features are added to the language. It’s not that different from what we have today with the hodgepodge of HTML features supported by different browsers.

So, will it work? Time will tell. 🙂