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 unusu-
ally, 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