I was glancing through the HTML5 and whatwg mailing lists when I saw this as the signature of Ian Hickson:
Things that are impossible just take longer.
How True! And the people in HTML 5 list sure need such kind words of encouragement.
Look at the schedule of HTML5 :
- 2008 Q2: Last Call Working Draft
- 2008 Q3: Candidate Recommendation
- 2010 Q2 Proposed Recommendation
- 2010 Q3 Recommendation
Man , stuff really takes longer!
For those who don’t know, Ian H is the head of the whole whatwg effort and is now working at Google. He is doing a pretty great job! And please go and help out on the spec, it is the first spec which is so open to the public.
That schedule isn’t really realistic in my opinion, by the way. The more realistic schedule (which the W3C refused to publish) is on the WHATWG wiki in the FAQ:
http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#When_will_HTML_5_be_finished.3F
(Consider, though, that HTML4, the last vesion of HTML, still isn’t done — there’s no complete implementation, and it has many known issues — and you’ll see why we are planning for the long haul!)
Thanks for your support!
Hey,
Lol. 2022!!!
You need a much better line to enthuse everyone till 2022.
But isn’t HTML4 already a recommendation? Or do you plan to make HTML5 a rec only after it has been actually implemented and tested well throughout! Such a devious and blasphemous route might shock the good people at w3c. You might set the wrong example for the large number of future spec authors, after all the work that has been done by so many groups on “how to create a rec quickly”.
heh.
And , it is my pleasure seeing the nice discussions on the mailing lists.
Specs take time to write, but takes even longer to test. To speed up the development a lot of efforts have to been done on developing test cases. The HTML 5 Specification is an abstract model if we would like to compare with previous specifications, it would include DOM + DOM HTML + HTML 4 + XHTML 1 + XMLHttpRequest + a few APIS + parsing model (new) etc. So it’s a lot bigger project than HTML 4 alone.
Ian Hickson is editing the document, but the W3C HTML WG including the whatwg members (subgroup of browser vendors), have not yet decided what will be the full content of the final HTML 5 Spec. We will know when the specification will reach last call.
Exciting time ahead. The big challenge is also how to have more authoring tools developers, Web site designers, and CMS developers participate to the HTML WG and give their perspective on the language.