Dries Buytaert

After 10 years of development, the W3C has promoted HTML5 to "Recommendation" yesterday: https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/4167. W3C's "Recommendation" status is the highest level of maturation, effectively making the markup language a formal standard.

Almost 20% of the world's websites have adopted HTML5, so for many, HTML5 is nothing new.

Drafting the HTML5 standard appears to have been a difficult and tiring process. It took more than 50,000 email exchanges, and the group's bug lists record more than 4,000 errors and ambiguities that had to be resolved.

With HTML5 complete, you might wonder what is next for HTML? Take a look at HTML.next, the list of HTML.next proposed elements and attributes or the list of postponed feature requests.

The trend in development seems to be towards native mobile applications rather than mobile websites, but the future of HTML and its modular design has some interesting things in store. In the long run, I think the line between native applications and web applications will blur. I think the future is better integration and more seamless transitions between the two. Standards are important and can't be here fast enough!