Having been in active development since 2004, HTML5 has never officially been completed and signed-off. It was in 2008 when the first specification draft was launched and browsers begun to implement parts of the standard however, support has been patchy and even now, there are still elements of the standard that have gone unsupported by many.
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), responsible for the specification, has officially completed the full and final definition of the standard, clarifying implementation points in a hope to establish predictable behaviour across implementations. This should prevent any further flux in the specification and provide a clear picture to browser developers.
HTML5 is still a little over a year from becoming the de-facto web standard, with a call for review expected in 2013, the standard will become a W3C recommendation in 2014.
Where do we go from here?
HTML5 is the first of what is known as a living specification for web standards. The groups responsible for developing HTML5 have already begun work on implementing new features, or rather, they never stopped, with a snapshot of this work occasionally taken and transformed into the next standard. In fact, a first draft of HTML5.1 is already in the works and it's the aim of the consortium to provide a new standard every two years i.e. 5.1 in 2016 and 5.2 in 2018.
This approach will provide a clear development schedule for the likes of Google and Microsoft and with any luck, keep firms from straying from the path an implementing their own vision of the internet (you know exactly who we're talking about).
