“Recognizing the pressures to ship a REC sooner – possibly with less functionality – than later, we are proposing a plan for taking a stable HTML5.0 specification to W3C Recommendation by the end of 2014”, said the new plan announced by W3C on its website. Earlier HTML5 was due to be developed at least until 2022 and only a candidate recommendation to be announced at the end of 2012. However, according to the recent proposal by W3C, now the HTML5 recommendation should possibly have lesser number of technologies and relaxed testing requirements. The group also plans to release a HTML5.1 recommendation by 2016. This is expected to be developed as a draft which will include some of the unstable and controversial features that couldn’t be included in HTML5.0.
The plan also focuses on using extension specifications and promotes creation of separate extensions instead of including them in the “monolithic kitchen-sink spec with a grab bag of features”. Doing so will enable such features and technologies to be focused more effectively by their proponents and allow the community to more easily advance that individual specification by reaching to a quicker consensus. HTML5 has very powerful hooks for such extensions and many features that were originally a part of HTML5, now have their own specifications like Web Workers, Web Sockets, HTML Microdata, WebRTC, WebVTT etc. There have even been some earlier specifications that were initially developed separately but have now been added as HTML5 features and extensions, such examples include SVG, MathML and WAI-ARIA.
The standardisation of HTML5 has been faced with a lot of backlash and has often run into a lot of problems. There has also been difficulty in reaching a common consensus with the different groups and members. Keeping that in mind, the W3C has also reiterated its policy for anti-social behaviour in its mailing lists. These announcements are definitely expected help the HTML5 Working Group in gaining traction for development of a good HTML5 recommendation.
