In this article we will help bring you up to date with current website development standards. HTML5 was a many year project that was launched in 2014; mostly as the concerted effort by the W3C organization. The plan was, from that point forward to continue to publish regular incremental updates to the HTML standard; but a few things didn’t happen as planned. Now a newly named organization, the Web Platform Working Group (WP WG) is working towards a HTML5.1 to be released within the next 6 months. The project centers around a general workflow; which means the group will be releasing a stable version of HTML, as a W3C recommendation, about once annually moving forward. HTML Specification Goals The core goals for future HTML specifications are to: * match reality better, * make the specification as clear as possible to readers, * to make it possible for all stakeholders to propose improvements, * and to understand what makes changes to HTML successful. HTML 5.1 Timeline The current schedule is to ship an HTML5.1 recommendation in September 2016. This implies they will need to have a Candidate Recommendation by the middle of June 2016, following a “Call For Consensus” based on the most recent working draft. The updated working draft is published approximately once a month; changes are noted within the specification itself. They practice an evolutionary schedule of “rinsing and repeating”; making regular incremental updates to HTML that is relatively straightforward to implement. If you are interested you can see current chatter from the working group members @HTMLWG on Twitter. read_more Specification development The HTML 5.1 specification is on a public Github server so anyone who can make a “pull request” and can propose changes. Simple changes will generally be accepted by the editors after their review. The group is tasked with generally removing things which don’t have adequate support in at least two shipping web browser engines. HTML is a quite a large specification. It is developed from a set of source files. This automates links between the various sections; such as sectional element definitions. For substantial new feature requests/implementations, they prefer submissions separate modules to be developed or...
