HTML5 vs. HTML
THANKS TO THE WORK of the WHAT WG, the orations of Steve, the acclaim of developers, and a dash of tasteful pamphleteering, the W3C finally has a hit technology on its hands. Indeed, it has a cluster of hot technologies, the latest incarnation of what we've been calling …
Context & Ripple Effects
Nine days before Zeldman wrote this, the WHATWG dropped the "5" and rebranded its spec simply as "HTML", a living standard under continuous revision rather than a numbered snapshot. His column is the community's read on what that rename means: after years of XML-flavored dead ends, the W3C finally has a technology developers actually want, even if the name now belongs to a different steward.
The momentum he credits has been building across the ecosystem for over a year: Microsoft's own program manager endorsed HTML5's multimedia tags back in September 2009, IE shipped an HTML5 video commitment by April 2010, and Google answered Apple's HTML5 push with its HTML5Rocks developer site that June — with Steve Jobs's public advocacy confirmed as a driver of the buzz.
First-order effects
- Developers now face a naming fork: the WHATWG's unversioned "HTML" versus the marketable "HTML5" label that Jobs, Google, and Microsoft have spent 2010 promoting to buyers and press.
- The W3C gains a rare hit technology, but one whose specification work it does not fully control — the WHATWG edits the document the W3C's process must ratify.
Second-order effects
- Browser vendors' competitive positioning shifts from shipping a numbered standard to shipping the fastest-moving implementation of a moving target, turning release cadence itself into the differentiator.
- Marketing budgets built around "HTML5" as a productized brand (Apple's showcases, Google's HTML5Rocks) now coexist with a spec that claims no version number, forcing toolmakers and conference organizers to reconcile the two vocabularies.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, web standards governance tilts from committee-versioned W3C recommendations toward vendor-implemented living specifications — with the WHATWG's editor-driven model setting the pace and the W3C reduced to a branding and ratification role.
- The episode also establishes advocacy-driven adoption as the template for future web-platform pushes: a high-profile champion plus developer acclaim can hand a standards body a hit faster than its own process can.
The trend: The web platform is transitioning from versioned, committee-ratified standards toward a continuously maintained living HTML stewarded by the browser-vendor-backed WHATWG.