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No More Version Numbers For HTML

Posted by timothy on from the now-they'll-have-threat-level-colors dept.

An anonymous reader writes "HTML5 will be the last version of HTML that carries a version number. Ian Hickson, a Google engineer and editor of the HTML5 standard, announced that the language will be transitioned to a 'living standard' without version numbers. A bit like Chrome, if you will."

4 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Linked blog article is fluff with no insight by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Go straight to the source instead.

    1. Re:Linked blog article is fluff with no insight by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Indeed, and as that article points out, this change in naming applies ONLY to what the WhatWG was calling "HTML5", not to be confused with what W3C calls "HTML 5." For anyone that's been following this, or has read Zeldman's HTML5 book, knows, "HTML5" and "HTML 5" can refer to entirely different sets of standards.

      The W3C, as far as I can tell, is still taking "snapshots" of WhatWG's "HTML" spec and numbering them, and the W3C is still the primary authority when it comes to official web specifications.

      This change really isn't as big of a deal as people here seem to think, and the original article does confuse the issue.

  2. Their justification FAQ: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Their justifications for the decision are here:

    http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#What_does_.22Living_Standard.22_mean.3F

  3. Re:Er, Why use Version Numbers At All? by Bogtha · · Score: 5, Informative

    How does removing the version number help the people who need to implement and work with the standard?

    It doesn't, it's a fucking disaster. I'll give a concrete example. I used HTML 5 audio on a site with a Flash fallback for browsers that didn't support it. All is good and well. One day, I start getting complaints that the audio is broken. Turns out that a) the HTML 5 spec had changed and b) Firefox had changed to match in a minor point release. Firefox 3.51 worked, Firefox 3.5.2 didn't, as I recall. The new API was indistinguishable from the old API in as much as all the same objects and functions were there, but a return value had changed. So, even with the best practice method of feature detection, anybody writing to the old API was screwed.

    So I fixed it up by removing the HTML 5 audio and made the decision to wait until HTML 5 was published in its final form. Something that I should have done to begin with really, it's madness to use HTML 5 at the moment as it's just not finished yet. You don't know what is going to change.

    And now they want to do away with a "final" version altogether? Gee thanks, guys! How am I going to be able to trust it to be stable enough to rely on ever again? What's going to stop the same thing from happening over and over again?

    --
    Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha