6 Chapter 1—Overview of the New Web Standard
As a result, a constantly growing list of so-called Issues is being tracked by the
W3C’s HTML WG (http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues). These issues
need to be resolved before declaring Last Call under moderation of the chairs
Sam Ruby, Paul Cotton, and Maciej Stachowiak. On the part of the WHATWG,
Ian Hickson took advantage of a calmer period and was able to temporarily re-
duce his issues list (http://www.whatwg.org/issues/data.html) down to zero,
leading him to announce HTML5 in Last Call to the WHATWG in October 2009.
A visible sign of the complexity of the events is the status of the specification.
With the WHATWG, the main specification is a compact document, whereas in
early 2011 the W3C had eight parts, all counting as part of the HTML5 package.
Two of them are generated directly from the WHATWG version and are marked
with an asterisk; the others are supplements and are in turn not contained in the
WHATWG version.
WHATWG Specification:
z HTML—Living Standard: http://whatwg.org/html
W3C HTML WG Specifications:
z HTML5 - A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML *:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5
z HTML5 differences from HTML4: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff
z HTML: The Markup Language Reference:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup
z HTML+RDFa 1.1: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-in-html
z HTML Microdata: http://www.w3.org/TR/microdata
z HTML Canvas 2D Context *: http://www.w3.org/TR/2dcontext
z HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html-alt-techniques
z Polyglot Markup HTML-Compatible XHTML Documents:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html-polyglot
Another WHATWG document exists in which all the WHATWG sections are com-
bined with additional specs for Web Workers, Web Storage, and the Web Sockets
API. This document, Web Applications 1.0—Living Standard, is well suited to
serve as an endurance test for HTML rendering: With more than 5MB of source
code and JavaScript to display the implementation stage of each section, plus
the option of adding direct comments to individual sections, it will stretch any
browser to its limit: