14 DAY TRIAL // In an effort to speed up HTML 5 development, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) announced at the start of July that it would discontinue all XHTML 2 research. This means that the XHTML 2 Working Group will stop all activity at the end of 2009, and all resulting resources will be redirected to the HTML 5 Working Group.
The XHTML 2 Working Group has been assigned to expand HTML as an XML mark-up language, working on correcting problems with internationalization, device independence, form processing and making it easier to integrate and combine with other mark-up languages. The group has been active since it was initially charted in March 2007, working alongside the HTML 5 group on developing new HTML web technologies.
Ian Jacobs, representative of W3C said, "We're investing in HTML 5 for the future," announcing W3C's future development plans. From this statement it's clear that XHTML 2 will not become a W3C standard, and all efforts to build an XML formulation for HTML will be continued for HTML 5.
This strategic move from W3C was hailed by the web-developing community. According to InfoWorld, Dion Almaer, co-director of developer tools at Mozilla, had the following to say: "XHTML was a rat hole, and now we can use W3C folks to help make HTML 5 better." The opinion is widely supported because HTML 5 seems to be one of the most powerful and anticipated web development tools to ever be released. Many actually feel that it could spell out an end to Flash-driven applications. "HTML 5 is really the second coming of this Web," concluded Dion Almaer about the future release of HTML 5 to the World (Wide Web).
Big names in the industry, especially browser developers, have also been involved in the development of HTML 5. Well, almost everyone, except for Microsoft, which has been pumping millions into the Silverlight project, which does practically the same thing as HTML 5. Another industry player that might have something against HTML 5 is Google. Mountain View developers may be concerned about the capabilities of HTML 5, which will make YouTube's Flash deployment for video presentations old and obsolete.
For the moment it's quite clear that things are still in the works at W3C, since more resources are needed for the HTML 5 group.