1. Overview of the New Web Standard

As is appropriate for a web standard, the story of HTML5 starts with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), or more precisely, with the W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents in June 2004. But rather unusually, the development of HTML5 initially took place outside of the W3C, because the W3C was not at all thrilled with the idea of HTML5 to start with. What had happened?

1.1 How It All Started

In a joint position paper, Mozilla and Opera demanded that the W3C should ensure the continued development of HTML, DOM, and CSS as the basis of web applications of the future. Given the fact that the W3C had already sidelined HTML4 six years before and had instead elected to back XHTML, XForms, SVG, and ...

Get HTML5 Guidelines for Web Developers now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.