HTML 5 and xHTML 5

W3C new working group is starting recruiting members for a new HTML working group, which will dedicate itself to the development of HTML5 and xHTML 5. Last october, W3C’s director Tim Berners-Lee has announced that a new group will be created which will work in the direction of a new HTML development. The new HTML is going to publish their results somewhere in 2010 which means that in 3 years, we will have something new to talk about. It is quite fast remembering other W3C specifications and standards which takes much more then 3 or 5 years, a good one is a CSS 3, which is still under development for a couple of year already.

Chris Wilson (Internet Explorer 7) and Dan Connolly (W3C) are the main leaders, which should publish new draft HTML and xHTML specifications already this July (2007). I believe that the large part of their work will be based on the WHAT-WG group, simply because there is no time for reinventing the wheel, and the first draft should be published in about 3 monthes. I hope that this group will include the parts from all major browser developers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari, because we need a stable progress from all browser developers to advance to the new specifications in the future. Mozilla Firefox has “conquered” something between 10 and 20% of the market, depending on the country and statistics, so excluding them will make no sense, as well as Safari, which is almost completely controls growing Apple’s market.

Interesting is that the old group working for xHTML 2 for already 5 years, will continue their work independently. Here i do not agree with W3C ideas, since forming a new group dissolves an elder one, otherwise we are risking to have 2 standards reigning and fighting against each other, and even the fact, that the main Internet Explorer man Chris Wilson is participating in a new HTML5 group does not change the fact, that so many decision are taken in upper echelons by people who has no knowledge about technology.

My voice and support goes to the new HTML 5 and xHTML 5 group, i am not a big fan of xHTML 2, since it breaks a lot of compatibility and introduces not so much of the elder xHTML things and being quite an old trouble maker. I feel that a lot of the new stuff from the HTML5 specification proposed by WHAT-WG, is desperately needed by the webdesigners. As for xHTML 5 – it can and should take the best ideas out of the xHTML 2 and implement them together with new changes of the HTML 5.

In the battle of HTML 5 vs xHTML 2 the first round is certainly for the HTML 5 and that is fine in my opinion, since the web desperately needs to move on from the state and standards of the last century.