Web community invited to help shape the next HTML

Partnership opportunity

The worldwide Web consortium, W3C, has invited companies including browser vendors, application developers, and content designers to help design the next version of HTML by participating in the new W3C HTML Working Group.

The group will conduct its work in public and solicit broad participation from W3C members and non-members.

“HTML started simply, with structured markup, no licensing requirements, and the ability to link to anything. More than anything, this simplicity and openness has led to its tremendous and continued success,” said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C director and inventor of HTML.

“It's time to revisit the standard and see what we can do to meet the current community needs, and to do so effectively with commitments from browser manufacturers in a visible and open way.”

The move follows the failed attempt to migrate HTML into an XML format, called XHTML. The first full XHTML recommendation was issued in early 2000 but due to the significant legacy of Web content that is some variant of HTML, browser vendors were slow to adopt it. This meant there was little motivation for content developers to adopt it either.

This put W3C under pressure to update HTML in a manner that is both consistent with community practice and backwards compatible. W3C will help ensure interoperability by developing robust test suites and validation services.

Despite its failure to take off on the Web, XHTML has been adopted in other markets, including mobile devices, enterprise applications and in some niche Web applications such as blogging software. For this reason W3C has decided it define an XML syntax for the new HTML, in addition to the classic HTML syntax.