It's been a few years, but HTML5 is done

Oct 29, 2014 12:44 GMT  ·  By

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), founded by Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, back in 1994, published its Recommendation of HTML5, the final version of the standard that needed years of tinkering to make perfect.

“Today we think nothing of watching video and audio natively in the browser, and nothing of running a browser on a phone. We expect to be able to share photos, shop, read the news, and look up information anywhere, on any device. Though they remain invisible to most users, HTML5 and the Open Web Platform are driving these growing user expectations,” said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director.

Basically, you, as a user, won’t feel much of a difference. Modern web browsers already support most HTML5 features such as the element and vector graphics.

As you may know, HTML5 brings to the Web video and audio tracks without needing plugins, as well as programmatic access to a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, which is useful for rendering graphs, game graphics and other visual images on the go. It also comes with native support for scalable vector graphics (SVG) and math (MathML) and more.

There’s still work to be done

As the W3C points out, even though HTML5 is widely deployed and popular among developers, there’s more to do to achieve the promises of the Open Web Platform, such as lowering the cost of developing powerful, cross-platform applications. Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO said earlier this month that now that HTML5 is done, W3C should do more to strengthen the parts of the Open Web Platform that developers most urgently need for success.

To that end, there are several issues that need to be improved in the future, such as the security and privacy elements (identity, crypto, multi-factor authentication, privacy protection), core web design and development (HTML next generation, style, layout, graphics, animations and typography), media and real-time communications (WebRTC, streaming media), services (social Web, Payments, annotations, web of data) and more.

The standardization process of HTML5 was once believed to take until 2020, but the W3C decided to speed things up and came up with “Plan 2014.” As part of this, they encouraged the Working Group to allow work on some controversial items to proceed on their own path in parallel to HTML5 as extension specs. Some were separately developed and then folded back into HTML5 before its completion.

Next, W3C will start fixing bugs and working on HTML 5.1.