4 Chapter 1—Overview of the New Web Standard
Three public mailing lists, linked via the Contribute section, are the main instru-
ments of communication—one for user questions, one for contributions to the
specification, and one for all those working on implementing the specification.
If you do not want to subscribe to the mailing list, you can also access the public
archives where all news items are filed and can be searched or downloaded:z [email protected]
http://lists.whatwg.org/listinfo.cgi/help-whatwg.org
z [email protected]
http://lists.whatwg.org/listinfo.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org
z [email protected]
http://lists.whatwg.org/listinfo.cgi/implementors-whatwg.orgThe specification is also being developed in a public and transparent manner—
more on this topic in a moment; it is not as straightforward as it sounds. In real-
ity, there is not just one specification but several versions of it. But for now, let’s
get back to the history of HTML5.
While the WHATWG was working on renewing HTML, the W3C’s XHTML2 Work-
ing Group set about creating a completely new web. Unlike the WHATWG, which
was aiming to achieve backward compatibility, the XHTML2 Working Group, led
by Steven Pemberton, tried to further develop HTML in a different way.
Instead of FORMS, XFORMS would be used; FRAMES would be replaced by XFRAMES;
and new XML Events would take the place of DOM Events. Each element could
have both a src and an href attribute, and the headers h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 would
be obsolete and be replaced by h in combination with a new section element.
Manual line breaks with br would be realized with l elements; hr would be called
separator; the new nl element would allow navigation lists; and to improve se-
mantic options, you could assign a role attribute with predefined or namespace-
extensible keywords to each element.
A drop of bitterness and the final nail in the coffin of the XHTML2 project was the
lack of support from the browser vendors. The attempted changes were too radi-
cal and did not take existing web content into consideration. Soon, the W3C also
came to realize that this development would not get far. In October 2006, Tim
Berners-Lee, the director of W3C and inventor of the World Wide Web, finally
relented and wrote in his blog:Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to
evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML,
including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and
namespaces all at once didn’t work.