Yes, it is coming. HTML5, that long awaited, almost mythic improvement over the old workhorse of the Internet, is coming to a web browser near you. Well, some of it is coming. Kinda, sorta.
Despite all the web developers who are champing at the bit, W3C – the World Wide Web Consortium, which regulates and publishes the specifications of the HTML standard – says the HTML5 specification (more than 900 pages!) is just not ready for deployment yet. Philippe Le Hegaret, W3C interaction domain leader said, “The real problem is can we make it work across browsers and at the moment, that is not the case.”
Just in case you haven’t heard a lot about HTML5, here’s the lowdown. It all started in 2004 at an Adobe-sponsored Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents. At that workshop, a group of developers from Apple, Mozilla, and Opera formed WHATWG – the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group to explore the possibility of upgrading HTML4 by adding support for web applications. At the time, W3C was less than enthusiastic.
WHATWG published its first working draft of “Web Applications 1.0” in September 2005. In 2006, W3C had a change of heart and announced that it would work with WHATWG on the evolution of HTML. The name was changed from Web Applications 1.0 to HTML5. W3C issued the first working draft of the HTML5 specification in 2007. Since then, both W3C and WHATWG have issued nearly identical specifications.
What’s all the excitement about? HTML5 offers some impressive new options, such as the ability to directly embed media with simple <video> and <audio> tags — no plugins required. And it offers new interactivity, such as drag and drop features. But the hype surrounding HTML5 has exaggerated its capabilities. Despite what anyone tells you, the HTML5 specification does not include web sockets, geolocation, SVG, or @font-face. Nothing does everything, and web developers will need to learn how HTML5 can work with next generation APIs, JavaScript, and CSS3 to produce the websites of the future.
When will browsers offer enough support for HTML5 to make it a viable web development tool? Depends on whom you ask. Le Hegaret says HTML5 will be basically feature-complete by mid-2011. Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, has suggested that HTML5 won’t reach full recommendation status until 2022. (For a fun look at the countdown to the time when HTML5 will reach recommended status, go to www.ishtml5readyyet.com.)
But there is a big difference between the release of a specification as a W3C recommendation and the adoption of a specification by users. Hickson himself noted, “Many of the things that are ‘new’ in HTML5 were actually invented by browser vendors years ago, we just went ahead and specified them for the first time. Most people writing web pages in the last ten years have unknowingly used HTML5 features.” And he said, “If I were developing a website, I’d use HTML, including some features that are new in HTML5, yes. It depends entirely on what the browsers support, though.”
What HTML5 specifications do browsers support? It varies widely from older versions of IE, which offer little support, to Opera, Safari, and Chrome, which support a hefty chuck of the HTML5 specification. To find out how your browser fares, go to http://html5test.com/.
While robust support of HTML5 may be a few years away, web developers are already learning how to take advantage of the new features. A good idea, given industry trends showing that HTML5 is fast becoming a must-have language for developers who want to stay competitive.