Boye Janus Boye

Standards: Are you ready for HTML 5?

25-Feb-2008

Tags: Portals and Content Integration, Web Content Management, Implementation, Industry Standards

In January the World Wide Web Consortium released the first working draft for HTML 5, a next version of the essential hypertext standard that we all use every day. The specification remains in development, and the final HTML 5 recommendation is not due out until 2010 according to the HTML Working Group.

Two years may sound like a fair notice, but many vendors in our space are still trailing behind on supporting the most recent version of HTML, HTML 4.01 which became a recommendation all the way back in late 1999.

From 1999 to 2007, the W3C declared HTML more or less dead and shifted focus to XHTML, although this failed to attract large-scale adoption, mainly due to incomplete browser support. Adoption of the recent XHTML 1.1 and XHTML 2.0 standards are almost non-existent as the W3C decided to sacrifice backwards compatibility.

Now HTML is back alive again and we can expect incremental revisions over the next years. Among the major news in HTML 5 is client-side data storage to enable users to edit documents interactively, and APIs for Web applications. You can take a look at the detailed differences, but remember that HTML 5 is still a draft.

A new version of the HTML standard sounds like a good thing, in particular to keep the Web 2.0 phenomenon from getting locked inside proprietary standards, e.g., from vendors like Adobe. We'll keep you informed of how the standard develops, but for now it is too early to let HTML 5 affect your development work. Instead I suggest you focus on making your sites work in the new browsers that are coming later later this year.

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