HTML5 Is Official

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has declared HTML5 a recommendation, meaning the tag collection is complete and ready to be put into browsers. Most of those tags (especially the structure tags like <section> and <article>) are already in all the big browsers.

It has been a long time from HTML 4.01, the last HTML recommendation, to HTML5. This was because W3C was trying to push XHTML, a stricter version of HTML that would have rejected most Web pages as broken. It did not have much success. Also, the W3C had become big and bloated, and was basically messing around with itself. Apple and some other companies got tired of this; they sponsored their own spec team, WHATWG, to come up with a set of tags that people actually wanted.

In time W3C and WHATWG agreed to work with each other. There was a lot of squabbling all around, especially around audio and video codecs. (W3C and hackerdom wanted Ogg codecs; the Apple suit who ran WHATWG wanted none of them, and left codec use undefined.) In time, the two groups parted ways, with W3C taking WHATWG’s work, slapping version numbers on it (living document, my ass!) and presenting HTML5 as a recommendation. So there.

The news was first reported in Slashdot, but I had trouble believing it at first because the only source was some obscure Web site. Ars Technica and every other tech rag reported it later.