1.2 Time Travel through Historic Events 7
If you want to go easy on your browser, you could either use the multipage
version of that document at http://www.whatwg.org/C or add ?slow-browser at
the end of the URL. That way, dynamic components will be skipped and you end
up with a static, faster-loading version without interactive elements.
If you want to keep track of the changes made to the specification, you have
several options. The WHATWG offers a Subversion repository of the complete
specification of which you can create a local copy:
z svn co http://svn.whatwg.org/webapps webapps
You can also access Commit messages of the individual revisions via Twitter, a
mailing list, or the web interface, the so-called web-apps-tracker:
z http://lists.whatwg.org/listinfo.cgi/commit-watchers-whatwg.org
z http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker
Whereas the WHATWG specification changes continuously with each revision,
the W3C drafts are subject to the so-called Heartbeat requirement, which means
that new versions of the W3C specification must be published at regular intervals
of three to four months as Working Drafts. By the time this book is published, the
next heartbeat will probably have occurred, and who knows, maybe even a Last
Call Working Draft will have been announced by the W3C.
If you want to explore the history of HTML5, the Time Travel section offers a
selection of links as portals to milestones and historic events. The article “Why
Apple is betting on HTML 5: a web history” offers a very good summary of the
entire HTML history. It is available at AppleInsider under the shortened URL,
http://bit.ly/2qvA7s.
1.2 Time Travel through Historic Events
Milestones in the development of HTML in selected links include the following:
z W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents (June
2004): http://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/index
z Position paper by Opera and Mozilla on further development of HTML:
http://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/papers/opera.html
TIP
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete.html