Many folks who are just tuning into the HTML5 saga because of the battle between Adobe and Apple are surprised to learn that the push to create a fifth official version of the HTML specification began six years ago. And that's just the first half of the story because the latest implementations, while nice, are far from standards. The HTML5 demos from Apple, for instance, are impressive, but they only run well on Safari.
That's how slowly committees can work. The browser creators and other stakeholders have a big collection of ideas for improving the browser and the Web, and these are gradually coalescing into a fifth generation for the standard. But agreement takes time. Many of the new tags and JavaScript functions exist already as experiments on some of the browsers, but interoperability and standardization are still to come. That's why the Flash groupies joke about HTML5 being a time machine to take you back to 2000.
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Author: Peter Wayner