Jeff Jaffee CEO of the W3C

After years of work, HTML5 is now officially a standard. The W3C group, the committee on the global standards of Web sites, announced that the technology has gained “Recommendation” status, which corresponds to a final version of HTML5. But as the consortium says in its press release, it is an evolving standard, and many issues remain to be studied.

Fifteen years after the release of HTML4 and 20 years after the creation of the W3C, HTML5 is a long-term investment. HTML5 is not the idea of the W3C, but of another group, the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group), which brought together browser vendors around a shared goal: to create a common standard for the web. It was not until 2007 that the two groups teamed up.

During this time, over 60 companies have contributed thousands of hours of work to fix over 4,000 bugs that occurred during the development of this new standard. HTML5 is now supported on a wide variety of devices, lowering the cost of creating rich applications to reach users everywhere.

Why HTML5 matters

HTML5 has been in use for years. According to the 2014 Vision Mobile Survey, 42 percent of over 10,000 developers surveyed are using a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript for all or part of their mobile applications. Gartner identified HTML5 as one of the top 10 mobile technologies that will be an essential technology for organizations delivering applications across multiple platforms.

Jeff Jaffee, CEO of the W3C, emphasized that there is still much work to do with HTML5 as a standard, but if one considers the web experience of 25 years ago, it’s easy to understand why new standards are needed.

“It is still too challenging for developers to create some types of Web applications,”Jaffee explained. “Lack of broad interoperability for some features complicates development. Lack of standard features in the platform drives developers to create hybrid applications, implying a larger mix of tools, libraries, and interoperability issues. There is more work to meet growing expectations around privacy, security, and accessibility,” he said in a blog post.

In fact, today what is commonly referred to the web is actually a platform for creating distributed applications on different devices. The rich media characterize the web outweigh the browser, not only work on desktop and laptop computers, but on TVs, eBook readers, soon also of cars and wearable.

HTML5 has revolutionized the web and mobile world as we know. With this new language, we can play games online in the browser, easily share our photos in social networks or edit documents collaboratively.

Write once, deploy anywhere

The purpose of HTML5 is primarily to achieve smoother web development. To help achieve the “write once, deploy anywhere” promise of HTML5 and the Open Web platform, W3C announced the completed definition of HTML5, representing the ability to provide a single source code that can be interpreted in the same way everywhere. The W3C community has also added to the HTML5 test suite, which includes over 100,000 tests and continues to grow.

From a more pragmatic point of view, HTML5 is mostly a consensus to serve as a fertile ground for web applications. The standard is accompanied by the addition of some debatable extensions including Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), which allow publishers to have a common infrastructure allowing the use of DRM on HTML5 video.

Even before the finalizing the standardization of HTML5, the language specification had already been implemented by almost all modern browsers, including Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer.

HTML5 will continue to evolve

It took almost two years for the working group on the project to conduct over 100000 tests to meet the requirements of the W3C standardization process. The release of HTML 5 marks the entrance of the HTML 5.1 Candidate Recommendation stage and the beginning of a period of two years of testing, as well as the release of a draft for HTML 5.2, leading to a Candidate Recommendation in 2016.

The versions 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 and higher will continue to come to fit the standard for other needs including Web applications (identity management, encryption, multi-factor authentication, etc.), interactions with devices (sensor management, Bluetooth, NFC chips), uses and accessibility, performance (pre-loading, responsive design, etc.) and design and development (evolution of HTML itself, layout, graphics, animation, typography, etc.), application lifecycle and most importantly security and privacy.

Jaffee said many W3C activities outside of standards development are geared toward enabling developers, including tools (validator), documentation (Web Platform Docs), training (W3DevCampus, W3Conf), participation (Community Groups, draft Webizen program).

photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc