Many folks who are just tuning into the HTML5 saga because of the
battle between Adobe and Apple are surprised to learn that the push
to create a fifth official version of the HTML specification
began six years ago. And that's just the first half of the story because
the latest implementations, while nice, are far from standards. The HTML5 demos from Apple, for instance, are
impressive, but they only run well on Safari.

That's how slowly
committees can work. The browser creators and other stakeholders have a
big collection of ideas for improving the browser and the Web, and these
are gradually coalescing into a fifth generation for the standard. But
agreement takes time. Many of the new tags and JavaScript functions
exist already as experiments on some of the browsers, but
interoperability and standardization are still to come. That's why the
Flash groupies joke about HTML5 being a time
machine to take you back to 2000.

To read the full, original article click on this link: How HTML5 will change the Web | Developer World - InfoWorld

Author: Peter Wayner