WHATWG puts HTML5 on the home straight

From the WHATWG group's point of view, work on HTML5 is almost complete. A blog entry from project manager Ian Hickson states that development has reached the 'last call' stage. This applies to the "Web Workers" and "Microdata vocabularies" standards. The FAQ describes just two further stages in the standardisation process before the standard becomes widely deployed.

According to the 'last call' section in the FAQ, problems and enhancement requests should be sent in "sooner rather than later", as it otherwise "might be too late". Feedback can be entered directly in the HTML5 specification or via the mailing list. Hickson does not indicate a time frame for how long this feedback period will last.

Over at the W3C, the textually identical HTML5 standard remains in the 'working draft' stage, with 12 issues remaining outstanding. The majority of the draft originates with the WHATWG, as the W3C, only recently abandoning its plans to use a new version of XHTML for the 'web of the future'. WHATWG and the W3C have also now come to an agreement over how to spell HTML5: never put a space before the '5'.

The issue of whether the next generation HTML standard should specify an SQL database as local storage for web applications also appears to have been settled, with WHATWG and W3C moving the issue into the 'Web Database' specification. The W3C also recently proposed a database API for browsers which did not make use of SQL.

(djwm)