W3C Announces Plan To Deliver HTML 5 by 2014

The World Wide Web Consortium has proposed "a new plan that would see the HTML 5 spec positioned as a Recommendation—which in W3C's lingo represents a complete, finished standard—by the end of 2014. The group plans a follow-up, HTML 5.1, for the end of 2016." Instead of working toward one-specification-to-rule-them-all in 2022, features that are stable and implemented in multiple browsers now will be finalized as HTML 5.0 by 2014 with unstable features moved into HTML 5.1 (developed in parallel). In 2014, the commonly implemented parts of HTML 5.1 will begin finalization for 2016, with the unstable parts moved into HTML 5.2 (wash, rinse, repeat). Additionally, things like Web Sockets are being moved into their own modular standards (sound familiar?) for "...the social benefits that accrue from such an approach. Splitting out separate specifications allows those technologies to be advanced by their respective communities of interest, allowing more productive development of approaches that may eventually be able reach broader consensus."

Browser vendors decide the specs?

[Eraesr]

So basically it's the browser vendors that eventually determine what goes in and what stays out? How much of an influence will Internet Explorer have on this?

No... you can't.

[HerculesMO]

And this is a huge problem for me as well, as I'm working on a project hoping for something better out of HTML5.

Streaming video with sensitivity to bandwith is something not available in the HTML5 spec at all. It's a simple "video" tag, which offers very little flexibility. h.264 will be the standard, VP8 is effectively dead. And that's fine, but when you have a situation where you want to auto adjust the quality based on bandwith (ala Silverlight "Smooth Streaming" or Flash), you can't do it in HTML5.

There's a project in works called MPEG DASH to do something around this, but that project is moving slower than molasses. I think people are content to keep using Flash or Silverlight, but in reality.. developers really want better options and HTML5 is already an archaic standard in a lot of senses.

uh oh

[archen]

I'm really worried. I've actually said the W3C should do everything they're going to do. It's not like the world is gaining sanity, which means I'm the one going insane.

I'm wondering what they'll be doing for the doctype declaration though, since it doesn't indicate any version (which is short sighted in my opinion)