Much confusion has surrounded the rollout of HTML5 and when it will actually be ready for use. In order to understand the actual timeline of HTML5’s development, it is helpful to review the steps that have already been taken to move the new standard to where it is now.
HTML5’s beginnings can actually be traced to a workshop sponsored by Adobe, the Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents in 2004, which was focused on the future of web apps. Although at the time the W3C was focused on pushing XHTML as the way forward for web development, a group of developers from Apple, Mozilla and Opera at the conference proposed moving HTML 4 forward by adding features better geared towards web applications. Although their proposal was rejected at the conference, the representatives from these companies continued to pursue their vision, forming the Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group, WHATWG, and began to work on what would eventually become HTML5.
They published their first working draft, at the time still under the banner of Web Applications 1.0, in September of 2005. In 2006, the W3C, frustrated by the inability of XHTML to gain traction, announced that they would support WHATWG in their efforts. At that point, the specification was renamed to HTML5. The WHATWG released the first working draft of the new HTML5 specification in 2007.
Since then, the WHATWG and the W3C have both moved forward on the HTML5 standard, maintaining separate but very similar specifications. In 2008, Ian Hickson, the editor of HTML5, indicated that he expected HTML5 to issue a last call in 2009, reach candidate status in 2012, finish testing in 2020, and reach full recommendation status in 2022.
Unfortunately, many have taken these comments to mean that HTML5 wouldn’t actually be ready for mainstream use until years in the future. Some of the confusion has surrounded a lack of understanding of the difference between the release of a specification and it actually reaching full recommendation status. In reality, the 2022 deadline, which marks the end of a long and incredibly detailed testing suite, is largely meaningless for developers; the date that really matters in terms of HTML5 being fully “ready” for mainstream use is the 2012 one.
But even that 2012 deadline can be slightly misleading. Because HTML5 is a modular specification, some parts of the draft are more mature than others. In fact, many parts of HTML5 are fully mature at the present time and ready to be used today. The key factor here is really browser support, rather than the efforts behind the scenes. If developers focus on which features of HTML5 have reliable support across different browsers, and how widely adopted the versions of those browsers that support these features are, they will get an accurate picture of where the standard is at in terms of real-world use.
There are several online resources that can be used to track current HTML5 browser support. Wikipedia, for instance, has a detailed run down of the current level of support for various HTML5 features among different browser layout engines.
Because HTML5 support currently varies across browsers, progressive enhancement is a great approach to offering cross-browser compatibility. Modernizer is an open source library that can detect which HTML5 features the user’s browser supports, and enable you to offer fallbacks when certain functionality is not supported.