HTML is now a Living Standard

The: 23/01/2011 - AT: 2:57

Ian Hickson announced on the whatwg blog, that HTML5 would now be known as simply "HTML", and from now on be maintained as a Living Standard.

Living Standards are not delayed the same way as versioned standard, and people can simply pick the features that they want to use, and go right ahead and implement them, as they get implemented by browsers. (Sometimes even earlier then that.)

Many new elements (article, section, footer, and header, etc.) of HTML are already supported by browsers, and as such safe to implement. But some web designers are still afraid to include them, usually excusing them self with that the w3c have yet to recommend HTML5, and they therefor consider it unsafe.

Another common excuse is browser support, but thats just another reason why they should tell users to upgrade their Browser.

The w3c on HTML

Things tend to move very slow at the w3c, they still insist on keeping their own snapshot, which have yet to reach recommendation for some reason.

We can only hope that they also adopt the "Living Standard" model for HTML, and hopefully eventually for CSS.

Currently the W3C continues to work on their own snapshot of HTML called HTML5, and they also recently released a Logo for HTML5.

Confusion

It doesn't make sense to use versioning for web standards. Its far better to have a living standard, which is continuously updated. It only makes sense in situations where backwards compatibility is broken, and you need to tell the browser specifically which version of the standard you are using.

The version numbering is creating confusion for beginners, especially when looking up individual CSS properties. Whether a given property belongs to CSS3 or CSS2.1 is totally irrelevant, but they are still listed in separate references on many sites.

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Author: BlueBoden