The Current and Evolving Standard: HTML5
While the W3C is still involved in web standards, a new group , the WHATWG , is busy creating a new standard for HTML: HTML5. The goal of HTML5 is to make sure that the HTML standard accurately reflects the state of the Web as it exists now. The WHATWG, or Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, includes representatives from all the major browser makers and is writing an HTML specification that includes only features that all the browser vendors have reached a consensus on supporting.
HTML5 does not demand that web pages be valid XML, relaxing some of the rules that XHTML 1.0 imposed. However, today’s valid HTML or XHTML will still be valid in HTML5 when it’s fully adopted.
While no current browsers offer 100% support for HTML5, most popular browsers support over 80%. To find out whether a particular browser offers support for an HTML5 feature, go to http://caniuse.com/, which maintains a list of all the features in HTML5 and which version of each browser supports them, along with the percentage of users whose
browsers support that feature. For example, at the time of the writing, 87% of users currently have browsers that fully support the HTML5 form features. However, only 9% of users have browsers that support SVG favicons.
Another important note about HTML5 is that the WHATWG has decided to do away with the concept of versions for HTML period. The HTML specification is being written to reflect the current and future state of the industry and will evolve over time with browsers. This is a new experiment designed to make sure that the specification process more accurately reflects the evolution of the Web.
