First Complete HTML5 Spec Released

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By Wolfgang Gruener
published

The W3C has published the first complete specifications for HTML 5 and Canvas.

The specifications (HTML 5, Canvas) are far from being final, but have reached candidate status on December 17. There is also a first draft for HTML 5.1 and Canvas Level 2.

The publication of the candidate is on track with W3C's original roadmap, which placed the candidate releases in Q4 2012, along with information about the penetration of HTML 5 features in web browsers, stability of each feature, interoperability of components, as well as an outline of potential at-risk features. The final spec is not expected to be released until Q4 2014.

Web browsers are not adopting the same features at the same pace, but show preference to their respective product strategy, which leaves developers at a state where they can only leverage a limited feature set that all browsers support at the core. It is not unreasonable to expect that it will take at least two more years until all major browsers will support all recommended HTML 5 features.

According to caniuse.com, IE10 currently supports 74 percent of the HTML 5 working draft features, Firefox 76 percent, Chrome 94 percent, Safari 77 percent, and Opera 77 percent.

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Wolfgang Gruener
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18 Comments Comment from the forums
  • virtualban
    Good!
    Hope youtube removes flash completely. I hate how it becomes unresponsive when made to run without hardware acceleration, and I hate how it throttles my gpu when in hardware acceleration.
    Reply
  • jujuvivi
    So much needed!
    W3C Recommendation:
    HTML 4: 24 December 1999
    HTML 5: Q4 2014 (?)
    15 years after while Internet was in its beginning phases.

    Still, I am impressed to see how much browsers have already implemented (between 74% and 94%).
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    Firefox 76 percent, Opera 77 percent.

    :O
    You mean Opera is more HTML5 compliant than FF ? Then why the hell does Opera render so many sites improperly ?
    Reply
  • kristi_metal
    Dependes which part that 77% is implemented. Maybe Opera implements only the minor stuff, who knows?
    Reply
  • Bloob
    virtualbanGood!Hope youtube removes flash completely. I hate how it becomes unresponsive when made to run without hardware acceleration, and I hate how it throttles my gpu when in hardware acceleration.It's a serious accomplishment from Adobe to get Flash to use as much resources as it does currently.
    Reply
  • annymmo
    mayankleoboy1You mean Opera is more HTML5 compliant than FF ? Then why the hell does Opera render so many sites improperly ?Because the sites themselves are crap.
    It's not that a browser support things like they should that the sites are made like they should.
    Reply
  • I think it would be better to remove the "Working Draft" from the comparison and only keep the recommendations: http://caniuse.com/#cats=HTML5&statuses=rec,pr,cr
    It would then result in Opera 50%, Safari 84%, IE 88%, Chrome 88% and Firefox 97%.
    Reply
  • john15v16
    Good!
    Hope youtube removes flash completely. I hate how it becomes unresponsive when made to run without hardware acceleration, and I hate how it throttles my gpu when in hardware acceleration.

    It has been a while since people started playing around with HTML5, and still nowadays there are some people that come with some comparisons between Flash and HTML5. I am a little bit tired about all this, and to be honest I am totally convinced that HTML5 and Flash are completely different solutions which make everything a bit pointless when comparing both, it is so clear to me what/when to use HTML5 or Flash.

    HTML5 is here to stay, it is for us, and it is for helping us with that boring monkey job nobody wants to do like building a video player with a scroll slider progress bar and some navigation buttons, or making a basic photo gallery with enchanted options, etc. If you are trying to do something more complicated than that, I am afraid you have to be prepared to waste a lot of time dealing with very annoying things like cross browser inconsistencies, performance issues, plus you never know if that thing will work in new browsers in the future. The main problem of HTML is and will be always consistency; it looks different among browsers when you are dealing with advanced features, careful, it could be a big pain, keep it simple if you want to sleep well.
    Reply
  • virtualban
    john15v16It has been a while since people started playing around with HTML5, and still nowadays there are some people that come with some comparisons between Flash and HTML5. I am a little bit tired about all this, and to be honest I am totally convinced that HTML5 and Flash are completely different solutions which make everything a bit pointless when comparing both, it is so clear to me what/when to use HTML5 or Flash.HTML5 is here to stay, it is for us, and it is for helping us with that boring monkey job nobody wants to do like building a video player with a scroll slider progress bar and some navigation buttons, or making a basic photo gallery with enchanted options, etc. If you are trying to do something more complicated than that, I am afraid you have to be prepared to waste a lot of time dealing with very annoying things like cross browser inconsistencies, performance issues, plus you never know if that thing will work in new browsers in the future. The main problem of HTML is and will be always consistency; it looks different among browsers when you are dealing with advanced features, careful, it could be a big pain, keep it simple if you want to sleep well.And I still hate flash. And I still want a fluid experience while in youtube without having hardware acceleration and gpu throttling. If Adobe is not up for the task, I sure hope Html5 is.
    Reply
  • teh_chem
    You heard about HTML5 all but replacing Flash-based media services, and that Flash support has been preemptively and vocally abandoned by so many web-based services (and devices), but HTML5 is so slow to be adopted and implemented. Youtube began their "trial" HTML5-based project almost 3 years ago (Jan 2010). Yet despite having joined the HTML5 trial, more than 99% of the videos I have come across play in Flash (using Chrome), not HTML5.

    Reply