What does the new development model html5 promise us?

I think many of you already know that the WHATWG has moved on to a versionless development model .
In the comments, a panic began about "what will happen now?". Panic is unreasonable, and the decision is very logical and takes into account modern realities.
I will try to explain that all this promises. Available and briefly.

W3C, WHATWG, WTF?

Let's start with a small educational program on the differences between WHATWG and W3C . These are two different organizations that pursue approximately the same goal — standardizing the web. To my surprise, in the previous topic, many of them lured
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WHATWG - was founded in 2004 by the Apple, Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software. Why?

In a nutshell, my subjective opinion. If you want the official - google it, quite interesting.

W3C is an organization that is self-conscious, it seems that they are far from programming, but also from the Internet in general. Many are outraged by their "standards . " In addition, they braked. As technology advances, they are slowly adopting outdated standards. For example, there is still no single standard, how to place blocks (layout) on a page. Only some Candidate Recommendations and sketches. And this is taking into account the fact that already 7 years ago, the web is made up by divas, and before that, 8 years old, it was made up with tables. During these 15 years, could one give birth to anything sane? And also - w3c was very fond of xml, although in fact no one needed this severity. If you disagree with me - think about whether you make up for xhtml1.1? Where from one & instead of & amp; the whole page collapsed?

In general, while the old fartals from w3c sat and made their xhtml2, which no one needed, the web was developing in a completely different direction, which they did not want to notice. Therefore, manufacturers of advanced browsers have created their own w3c, you know with what . WHATWG turned out to be more far-sighted (although this foresight was simply to open any popular site and see what was used there) and by 2009 it had finally brought w3c to life. Although they still will not pick up the pace.

Will everything be very bad?

In the previous topic, there were a lot of panicked statements like “browsers will now behave unexpectedly” and “browsers may no longer fully implement the standard”. This is all wrong and such a step will only stimulate support for the entire specs of html browsers. Because now each of them has the opportunity to justify himself, saying “the standard is a draft. We want - we realize, we want - we do not realize. You will complete it, and we will be tightened by 2022 ”.

Now the standard is a set of specifications. And, most likely, it will be backward-compatible with rare exceptions. That is, if today the standard is adopted, then very substantial reasons will be needed to cancel it.

Why did they make such a decision?

Look at the browser support for different technologies. For example, browser support for CSS2 and CSS3 . Until now, not everyone supports even the second version, what can we say about the third one? With html5 everything is exactly the same. And it is quite possible that this will continue in the future. That is why “versioning” does not make sense - it does not help, but only worsens the understanding of the situation.

WHATWG switched to a more correct model, which is already used by many modern frameworks, for example modernizr .
Browsers implement not some separate version of the standard, but some parts of the standard, among which new ones appear regularly.
For example, the Firefox browser supports the Audio-API from version 3.5, but the preload property is only available starting from version four, and the loop property is still not implemented.
And each browser has such nuances. Google Chrome, Opera, Interner Explorer 9, all the rest. WHATWG just looked at the market and adjusted to it, making it right. Versions did not carry any load behind them, except for artificial restrictions “unfortunately, in this version we cannot add anything”. Standards will simply be added as market demands, and browsers will be forced to implement them as quickly as possible.

And how should we be now?

And as they were - so be it. Nothing has changed. When you implemented any chip - did you watch which latest version of html does the browser support? Not. You watched what features the browser supports, or even simply applied the rules, and how the browser succeeds! For example:

if (Modernizr.canvas) { var c = document.createElement('canvas'); var context = c.getContext('2d'); // // Build your chart // document.getElementById('chartContainer').appendChild(c); } 

 .multiplebgs div p { /* properties for browsers that support multiple backgrounds */ } .no-multiplebgs div p { /* optional fallback properties for browsers that don't */ } //   div p { border-radius: 15px; /*   ie   ,  */ } 

For us, nothing has changed. Just WHATWG confirmed that this is the right approach.

What is the name?

Why did they refuse the prefix "5"?
My assumption is that html is the standard technical part. html5 is the same trend as web2.0, which is nowhere to go. Moreover, html5 combines not only html by itself, but also css3, javascript and everything else. And now, many sites made with the help of the usual html4 + javascript are called html5 for some features.
On the official Twitter account they reported the following . It can be seen that they do not give up the name html5, but simply separate the concepts of html and html5, as something slightly different, so you can not throw the ordered T-shirts in the trash:

whatwg.org/html is getting renamed from HTML5 to HTML in order to avoid confusion with the HTML5 buzzword. Okay? # html5

Let me remind you that in the doctype it was never mentioned html5:

 <!DOCTYPE html> 

In fact, the difference is not much. In our hearts, file api and canvas api will forever be named as html5.

Upd: what do they write on the wiki

In the official wiki indicate the following:

HTML is the main focus of the WHATWG community. HTML5 is a snapshot of HTML, which is being worked on by the W3C HTML Working Group.

HTML5, XHTML1, and DOM Level 2 HTML code. Besides defining a HTML and XML (XHTML) language. Some of these APIs were known as “DOM Level 0” and were never documented before. It is also important to build Web applications.

Going forward, the WHATWG is just working on "HTML", without worrying about the version numbers. When people talk about HTML5 in the context of the WHATWG, they usually mean just "the latest work on HTML", not necessarily a specific version. For more details, see this section called " "> Is this HTML5? "in the specification.

Translation from VasilioRuzanni

HTML is the main focus of the WHATWG community. HTML5 is the HTML version that the WHATWG community is working on, as well as the HTML W3C working group.

HMTL5 is a new version of HTML4, XHTML1, and DOM Level 2 HTML, the task of which is to fix many of the shortcomings in the specifications of the above standards, and, at the same time, to improve (X) HTML itself for use in modern web applications. In addition to defining a markup language that can be written using both HTML and XML (XHTML), it also defines many APIs that form the basis of the web architecture. Some of these APIs are known as “DOM Level 0” and have never been officially documented. Nevertheless, they are extremely important both for the creators of browsers, whose products must support both existing web content and the authors of web applications.

Looking forward, WHATWG is simply working on “HTML” without worrying about version numbers. When people talk about HTML5 in the context of WHATWG, they usually mean “recent developments in HTML”, but not necessarily some specific version. More details about this can be found in the section " Is this HTML5? " In the specification

Conclusion

The innovation is correct and quite logical. Versioning is needed only within the version control system, and browsers are required to follow the latest html standard. We are waiting for a brighter future with html5 =)

And who is interested in following the developments and details - subscribe to the official Twitter WHATWG