News

HTML 5 Specs Ready for Final Review

HTML 5 Working Draft reaches "Last Call" milestone.

• By Kurt Mackie
• 05/31/2011

The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) announced that the HTML 5 Working Draft has reached its Last Call milestone, which means the specification is ready for final testing and public comment.

HTML 5 is the W3C's newest specificiation for Web technologies since HTML 4.01 was released a dozen years ago (in 1999), according to a blog by Paul Cotton, the HTML Working Group's co-chair at the W3C and group manager for Web services standards and partners in the Microsoft Interoperability Strategy Team. At the Last Call stage, the W3C receives final comments on what they consider to be stable code. The comment period for reporting bug issues with HTML 5 ends August 2. The W3C's full timeline for completing the Last Call milestone is published here.

The next major milestone will be the Candidate Recommendation period, scheduled for completion in the second quarter of 2012, according to the W3C's timeline, which is subject to change. A Proposed Recommendation period follows, scheduled for completion in the first quarter of 2014. The actual Recommendation, expected to appear in the second quarter of 2014, is the phase where the W3C formally endorses the spec.

Even though HTML 5 currently is not feature complete, the W3C says in its FAQ that HTML 5 can be used today. "One can use HTML5 today, knowing the existing limitations and using fallback mechanisms," the FAQ states. HTML 5 notably has some accessibility issues to be addressed, according to the W3C.

Cotton noted a few features that have already been popularized, including HTML 5's support for video in browsers, which previously have relied on using browser add-ons, such as Adobe's Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight. He also pointed to audio support and the use of the canvas tag for two-dimensional graphics. Cotton previously floated the idea in an interview that many applications could be written entirely in HTML 5.

Six parts of the broad HTML 5 specification are up for testing and comments, including "HTML5," "HTML+RDFa 1.1," "HTML Microdata," "HTML Canvas 2D Context," "Polyglot Markup: HTML-Compatible XHTML Documents" and "HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives," according to the W3C's announcement.

The W3C currently has 1,276 approved test cases and 28,858 submitted tests for HTML 5, according to a blog by Philippe Le Hégaret, who is described as the "W3C manager responsible for HTML5, CSS, SVG, WOFF, and other user interaction technologies."

The W3C has also published its report on Web tracking and user privacy based on an event held at Princeton University in April. Attendees agreed that "do not track" Web technology should be standardized and that there should be an ongoing focus on Web privacy issues at the W3C.