HTML 5? It'll be finalised in 2022

Ian Hickson, HTML 5 Editor, has set out the date for HTML5 to become final – 2022. In an interview in TechRepublic, Hickson described the time table and the development cycle of HTML 5 and explains why the final date of 2022 is so quite so far in the future.

The aims of HTML 5 are more extensive than previous HTML specifications, setting out how pages should render rather than detailing what the elements in a page specify and leaving the interpretation up to the browser developer. To be able to verify this, HTML 5 is going to require a very extensive test suite, and it's the development of this test suite that pushes the time scales out to 2022. HTML 5 will, according to Hickson's timetable, have a candidate recommendation, that is a complete specification, in 2012. The next ten years are dedicated to three cycles of developing test suites and making appropriate modifications to the specification, resulting in a proposed recommendation, with a complete test suite in 2022.

This does not mean that there will not be HTML 5 browsers till 2022. The expectation is that there will be an adoption of HTML 5 elements into browsers running up to 2012, with the browser developers converging on the candidate recommendation. We have already seen some browsers incorporate the <video> HTML 5 element for embedding of video in their current betas.

(djwm)