Kevin Yank has written up a roundup of the first six months with the new HTML working group, with one piece of very positive news:

A Surprise Proposal

Before the search could begin, however, representatives of Mozilla, Apple, and Opera came forward with a proposal to adopt the WHAT Working Group’s HTML5 draft specification as a starting point for further development of HTML within the W3C.

After no small amount of discussion, the W3C’s HTML WG today voted to accept the proposal, with these specific outcomes:

• The WHAT Working Group’s HTML5 (Web Applications 1.0 and Web Forms 2.0) will become the current working draft, and an extensive review by the new working group will now take place.
• The final W3C specification will be named “HTML 5″.
• The W3C specification will be edited by Ian Hickson (Google), editor of the WHAT-WG’s HTML5, and David Hyatt (Apple/Safari).

And there we have it: the harmful division that had come to exist between the major browser vendors and the W3C seems to be a thing of the past! So far so good, right?

Of course, there are still big challenges ahead, not least of which will be getting this large and open working group to agree on a seemingly endless list of technical minutiae.

It is good to see the great work in HTML 5 to be used as a starting point, and I look forward to watching where things go from here!

by Dion Almaer