As you are most likely aware, the current version of HTML is designated 4.01. It has been in use since 1999, and since that time the web has gone mainstream, while HTML 4 established itself as the immutable standard, together with XHTML 1. Still, nothing lasts forever: big companies are dedicating staff to work on the creation of a new and improved version of the venerable mark-up language.

Just earlier this month IBM Developer Works published an informative article on the next version of HTML, providing examples and a useful summary of what HTML 5 is about. This is a fortunate development for curious web developers, because the official draft at W3C is a complex document, spanning many, many pages, and full of technical trivia. As it turns out from parsing that article, HTML 5 will not be a radical departure from the current version, but it will introduce important new tags and attributes. The additions will provide welcome new ways to structure content, which, in the end, is what HTML is all about.

From the article: "HTML 5 introduces new elements to HTML for the first time since the last millennium. New structural elements include [article], aside, figure, and section. New inline elements include time, meter, and progress. New embedding elements include video and audio. New interactive elements include details, datagrid, and command." The logic behind the new inclusions is quite straightforward: for example the new article tag will be used for the text of articles, aside -- for side notes, time -- for numeric values signifying time, etc. Div and span will be still used, but in fewer places.

An important feature of the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web will be that it will be designed to degrade as gracefuly as possible. This means that HTML 5 documents will render reasonably well in browsers that don't explicitly support it. Also, as shown in ongoing technical discussions among developers, special attention is dedicated to making the language flexible and easy to use: for example, <alt> tags may be omitted for images that serve decorative purposes, and both <br> and <br /> are valid.

Don't expect an official release soon. The group that works on HTML 5 alongside W3C -- WHATWG, states in its FAQ section that HTML 5 is expected to reach W3C recommendation status in 2022 or later. Why does it take so long? Because the language will have to pass an estimated twently thousands tests before that, and that's only part of the process. Still, the first partial implementations of HTML 5 elements will appear much earlier, possibly before the end of this decade.

As slowly as the work is proceeding, it is encouraging that effort is dedicated to improving the web.

Who's who
The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, or WHATWG, is a community interested in evolving HTML and related technologies. The WHATWG was founded by people from Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Member organizations maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the WWW.

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