HTML5 is done - HTML 5.1 next on standards agenda

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has officially announced that the HTML5 and Canvas2D specifications are now complete and are now candidate recommendations. This does not mean that they are now a standard, but the W3C has moved on to the phase where members, businesses and developers can use the specifications for "implementation and planning".

The W3C HTML Working Group is moving on to begin testing that the specification can be implemented portably on all the various venues (browsers, authoring tools, email clients, servers, CMS) that it will be used in, by examining the current implementations and finding which areas need test development. This next phase will last into mid-2014, after which there should be a publication of a final, royalty-free HTML5 Recommendation.

In the meantime, new HTML5 work will take place in the development of HTML5.1 and Canvas 2D Context, Level 2. The work will encompass extensions to HTML5's accessibility, responsive images, and adaptive streaming. It will be around 2016, according to current schedules, before HTML5.1 becomes a recommendation, though this is a more rapid development schedule than HTML5; work began on that in 2004 at the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group).

(djwm)