HTML5: Up and Running

A Competing Vision

In June 2004, the W3C held the Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents. Present at this workshop were representatives of several browser vendors, web development companies, and other W3C members. A group of interested parties, including the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software, gave a presentation on their competing visions of the future of the Web: an evolution of the existing HTML 4 standard to include new features for modern web application developers:

The following seven principles represent what we believe to be the most critical requirements for this work:

Backward compatibility, clear migration path

Web application technologies should be based on technologies authors are familiar with, including HTML, CSS, DOM, and JavaScript.

Basic Web application features should be implementable using behaviors, scripting, and style sheets in IE6 today so that authors have a clear migration path. Any solution that cannot be used with the current high-market-share user agent without the need for binary plug-ins is highly unlikely to be successful.

Well-defined error handling

Error handling in Web applications must be defined to a level of detail where User Agents (UAs) do not have to invent their own error handling mechanisms or reverse engineer other User Agents’.

Users should not be exposed to authoring errors

Specifications must specify exact error recovery behaviour for each possible error scenario. Error handling should for the most part be defined in terms of graceful error recovery (as in CSS), rather than obvious and catastrophic failure (as in XML).

Practical use

Every feature that goes into the Web Applications specifications must be justified by a practical use case. The reverse is not necessarily true: every use case does not necessarily warrant a new feature.

Use cases should preferably be based on real sites where the authors previously used a poor solution to work around the limitation.

Scripting is here to stay

But should be avoided where more convenient declarative markup can be used. Scripting should be device and presentation neutral unless scoped in a device-specific way (e.g., unless included in XBL).

Device-specific profiling should be avoided

Authors should be able to depend on the same features being implemented in desktop and mobile versions of the same UA.

Open process

The Web has benefited from being developed in an open environment. Web Applications will be core to the Web, and its development should also take place in the open. Mailing lists, archives and draft specifications should continuously be visible to the public.

In a straw poll, the workshop participants were asked, “Should the W3C develop declarative extensions to HTML and CSS and imperative extensions to DOM, to address medium level Web Application requirements, as opposed to sophisticated, fully-fledged OS-level APIs?” The vote was 11 to 8 against. In their summary of the workshop, the W3C’s members wrote, “At present, W3C does not intend to put any resources into the third straw-poll topic: extensions to HTML and CSS for Web Applications, other than technologies being developed under the charter of current W3C Working Groups.”

Faced with this decision, the people who had proposed evolving HTML and HTML forms had only two choices: give up, or continue their work outside of the W3C. They chose the latter, registered the whatwg.org domain, and in June 2004, the WHAT Working Group was born.