Webware

In a rare display of public goodwill between Google and Microsoft, the companies are bonding over Microsoft's decision to actively participate in the HTML 5 standards process.

In a post to the The WHATWG Blog spotted by Ars Technica, Google's Mark Pilgrim, the company's leading HTML 5 evangelist, thanked Microsoft's Adrian Bateman for joining the conversation over HTML 5 development several weeks ago. "On August 7, 2009, Adrian Bateman did what no man or woman had ever done before: he gave substantive feedback on the current editor's draft of HTML5 on behalf of Microsoft. His feedback was detailed and well-reasoned, and it spawned much discussion," Pilgrim wrote.

Despite its role as the developer of the most widely used browser in the world, Microsoft had been practically silent on the development of the HTML 5 standard until August, when Bateman weighed in on some potential choices for how various tags will be implemented in the standard. Since then, Bateman has endorsed the use of the <video> and <audio> tags in the standard, something that Google and other browser developers are very keen in including in the final standard.

HTML 5 is a big part of Google's agenda for the next several years with respect to its Chrome browser and Chrome OS project. Google executives have chided Microsoft for its slow embrace of the project, which would make all browsers more capable of running applications, but have acknowledged that Microsoft's road to HTML 5 is complicated by the fact that many businesses have built applications around the current version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser and would be forced to modify or start over from scratch when the new standards are implemented.

"As you might expect, much of the discussion since August 7 has been driven by Microsoft's feedback. After five years of virtual silence, nobody wants to miss the opportunity to engage with a representative of the world's still-dominant browser," Pilgrim wrote.

Google and Microsoft, of course, are otherwise at each other's throats in the day-to-day competition to dominate the tech industry. There's a longstanding animosity between the CEOs of the two companies, and they are each attacking the other's backyard in hopes of defending their current dominant positions. Microsoft has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing a worthy competitor to Google search, and Google has taken aim at Microsoft's dominant position in office productivity software while unveiling plans for its own lightweight operating system.

Google announced Tuesday that the third stable release of Chrome is ready for the world, a little over a year after its debut.

The stable version of Chrome 3.0 is much faster than its predecessors when it comes to JavaScript performance, according to Google.

(Credit: Google)

Chrome releases evolve from developer previews to beta releases to stable ones, and the third version of Google's Web browser has now earned that coveted status. It's about 25 percent faster than the Chrome 2.0 stable version, and the new version (click here for download) also comes with a few tweaks.

Google redesigned the New Tab page with a click-and-drag mentality, added icons to the Omnibox to distinguish between searches, sites, and bookmarks when entering text in the address bar, and perhaps most significantly, added support for the video tag in the HTML 5 standard in a stable version of the browser.

Bringing HTML 5 technologies into Chrome is a huge part of Google's strategy for both the browser and Chrome OS, coming one day to a Netbook near you. The capabilities delivered by the video tag were a highlight of Google's presentation to developers at Google I/O in May: the tag allows Web developers to embed videos like they were photos, alleviating the need for plug-ins.

Let us know if you have any problems with the stable version of Chrome. Developer preview versions of Chrome 4.0 are well under way, but Google has yet to release a Mac version of the browser despite interest from luminaries such as Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Today's Web programmers face a big choice when it comes to fancier aspects of their sites: HTML or Flash? One start-up hopes it can bridge the gap with a technology called FluidHTML.

FluidHTML shows its technology to build Flash applications with HTML-style programming with this Pong demo.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The start-up, FHTML, announced software Monday at the TechCrunch50 conference that's intended to give HTML-style programmers the ability to use Flash features.

FluidHTML's language is an extension of HTML, the company said. "We borrow a lot of the really good ideas from HTML, because why wouldn't we?" said Chief Executive Michael Collette at the conference.

The approach holds some promise--but it also poses some risks. It may be complicated trying to get HTML and Flash programmers to work together, but at least those are established disciplines. FluidHTML requires a language known by neither set of coders right now, and the technology is supported just by a start-up still seeking its own programming staff and $1 million to $2 million in venture funding.

HTML, the traditional language of the Web, got its start showing just text and images with basic layouts. The second, begun by Macromedia and now led by Adobe Systems, is better suited for animations and flashy graphics, video, and increasingly, applications as well.

But a different set of programming skills are required to build Flash-powered sites or applications, so it doesn't always coexist easily on the same Web site. Programming is getting even more complicated as Flash converges with HTML and its companion, JavaScript.

FluidHTML relies on a Flash software module that programmers can embed in their Web pages. It interprets the HTML-esque code to supply Flash features such as vector graphics, sound, and video.

"The markup language supports very powerful commands (tags) and can do remarkable things that take enormous development effort in Flash," the company said. "FluidHTML RIAs (rich Internet applications) can be developed by less expensive programmers and require fewer man-hours to build than Flash."

Google has issued the first developer preview version of its Chrome browser to reach the version 4.x milestone, a phase that should bring some advanced features in the forthcoming HTML 5 specification for Web pages but that for now just sports a cloud-based bookmark synchronization tool.

Google's Chrome browser is getting a bookmark sync tool.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

"Once you set up sync from the Tools menu, Chrome will then upload and store your bookmarks in your Google Account. Anytime you add or change a bookmark, your changes will be sent to the cloud and immediately broadcast to all other computers for which you've activated bookmark sync," programmer Tim Steele said in a blog post Monday. Steele introduced the Chrome bookmark feature less than three weeks ago.

I set up the bookmarks feature with no trouble on version 4.0.201.1 of Chrome for Windows; note that to get it to work, you must specifically enable it at launch by adding the "--enable-sync" option to the launch command. The wrench menu (think tools) offers the new menu item to synchronize bookmarks. Clicking on it springs open a dialog box that prompts you to log in with a Google account; doing so then sends the bookmarks to the server.

The Mac version of Chrome--which by the way now enables by default plug-ins such as Adobe Systems' Flash and has grown much more stable--didn't yet support bookmark sync Monday night, so I couldn't test the actual synchronization itself on my present home setup.

Google doesn't draw much attention to version numbers, using them more as developer placeholders than beacons for marketing or support purposes. Google updates Chrome automatically, so users often get new versions without even knowing about it. But the new versions can indicate when the company is making significant changes behind the scenes.

After leaving much of the creation of a new version of HTML to Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla, Microsoft has begun sinking its teeth into the Web standard.

The move adds clout to the effort to renovate HyperText Markup Language, the standard used to describe Web pages, which last was formally updated in 1999. In a mailing list posting on Friday, the software giant offered a host of questions and concerns with the present proposal.

"As part of our planning for future work, the IE team is reviewing the current editor's draft of the HTML5 spec and gathering our thoughts. We want to share our feedback and discuss this in the working group," said Internet Explorer Program Manager Adrian Bateman in the message. "I will post our notes as we collect them so we can iterate on our thinking more quickly. At this stage we have more questions than answers, but I believe that discussing them in public is the best way to make progress."

HTML 5 in its current draft form includes a number of significant advancements, notably several that make the Web a better foundation for applications, not just static Web pages. Among the present HTML 5 features are built-in video and audio, the ability to store data on a local computer to enable use of Web applications even when offline, Web Workers that can perform computational chores in the background without bogging down Web application responsiveness, Canvas for creating sophisticated two-dimensional graphics, and drag-and-drop for better Web application user interfaces.

So what, exactly, is Google planning to do with On2 Technologies' video software?

The search giant isn't saying. The planned $106.5 million transaction isn't going to make too much of a dent in Google's coffers, but the transaction comes during a hot debate about which future technologies will power Web video. CNET News' Stephen Shankland and Tom Krazit pondered the implications of the deal, and here's what they thought:

Shankland: When I heard about the acquisition, I immediately wondered if the move could tidy up the mess that is that Web video or clutter it up even more.

On2 offers video compression technology that's used, among other notable places, in Adobe's Flash software and the Hulu video site. The company licenses various "codecs"--the software used to encode video so it's compact enough to squeeze down a narrow Internet pipe, then to expand it at the other end. It's a major technical challenge--one that's getting more important people to spend more time watching online video and more companies to attempt to profit from that.

Krazit: Well, it all depends on what they do with it, right? Google's being coy about this particular acquisition, but there really are only two reasons to do this: open-source the codec and throw a third wrench into the HTML 5 video tag standards debate, or bake it into existing technologies like YouTube--in hopes of getting that business to start making money--or mobile software.

At the moment, my bet is on the YouTube-mobile option: does Google really want to risk holding up HTML 5 adoption any further, regardless of the hint they dropped in the press release that "video compression technology should be a part of the Web platform"?

Shankland: Those alternatives aren't mutually exclusive. Google might just be buying trying to lower its costs by sidestepping YouTube's current streaming technology, which uses Adobe Systems' Flash software. Dan Rayburn, executive vice president at StreamingMedia.com, says Google doesn't have to pay Adobe fees to use Flash at YouTube. But Laura Martin, an analyst with Soleil-Media Metrics, believes that using On2 technology could trim YouTube's network bandwidth costs.

In the long run, though, getting On2's technology accepted as a built-in Web video standard could help both YouTube and Google's grander ambitions for the Web.

Google controls Chrome, of course, but getting the other 97 percent of the browser world to move will be harder. When it comes to building support for Web video straight into the Web, rather than using a plug-in such as Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight, Apple's Safari uses H.264 while Mozilla and Opera use a license-free alternative called Ogg Theora. Chrome will support both, but Internet Explorer doesn't have any support at all.

Right now, that video variety has been a thorny issue for the effort to hammer out HTML 5, the next incarnation of the Hypertext Markup Language that's used to describe Web pages. Even though the video tag looks like a big part of HTML 5, specification author (and Google employee) Ian Hickson so far isn't naming a codec.

Krazit: "Thorny issue" seems like an understatement. Why would injecting a third standard (that not everyone believes is necessarily a superior option) make sense, at this point? I suppose that there's a Clintonian "third way" argument to be applied here, in that if Apple and Mozilla are lining up on opposite sides of the debate over H.264 versus Ogg Theora, a freely available version that has clear patent ownership collected in one place might solve some of the sticking points on either side. Still, we'd be once again dependent on Google's "Dude, you can totally trust us. We're Google!" argument that it won't later subvert the standard with patent claims.

Not to mention the fact that Microsoft and its Internet Explorer are still unlikely to play ball, no matter what Google proposes.

Shankland: Well, one way Google could win over Mozilla at least is by releasing the codec as open-source software. That may or may not be possible, depending on what On2 has had to license, but Google apparently isn't happy enough with Ogg Theora's quality to bring it to YouTube, according to Hickson.

But I wouldn't rule out Microsoft quite so fast, even though I'm sure that it would like to get as much royalty revenue as possible through Silverlight video streaming and its own video codecs. Google has an affinity for open-source licenses such as Apache that permit use of code in proprietary software. That could reduce the philosophical barriers to Microsoft. And if Google can offer a high-quality codec in the HTML 5 standardization effort, maybe making On2's codec into open-source software could help coax the Internet Explorer team on board.

Let's not forget that HTML 5 is under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and they don't like standards encumbered by royalty constraints.

Also, if I were writing standards, I'd favor codecs such as On2's that also work on mobile devices. The iPhone doesn't support Flash, and I'm sure that Google wants YouTube on as many handsets as possible.

Krazit: Google's trying to pull off a lot these days, when it comes to making the Web the future platform for developers. It's a huge proponent of the HTML 5 push, devoting an entire day of Google I/O in May to explaining why this move is so important, and preaching to developers about how open standards and browser-based development are the wave of the future.

But you'd think that at some point, the company would start thinking of ways to differentiate its own products against the rest. Chrome and the forthcoming Chrome OS are ostensibly being developed with the hope that they will gain traction in the market. How will they do that, however, if they are just cookie-cutter versions of the same standards-based technologies on which everybody else jumps?

One way would be through offering excellent video performance that isn't widely available to the rest of the world, i.e., keeping VP8 and future On2 codec derivatives either in-house or available for a fee. Is Google going to open-source everything it ever develops under the strategy that anything that gets people on the Web ultimately comes back to its bottom line? Surely, that can't scale.

Shankland: No, Google won't open-source everything--and stop calling me Shirley. The company loves improving the Web as a foundation for applications, an effort that needles companies such as Microsoft or Apple that have their own developer ecosystems to nuture. But when it comes to the applications themselves--Gmail and Google Docs, for example--Google isn't so into sharing.

So I guess that some of this On2 situation comes down to the extent to which the video codec work is an end or merely a means to an end, like Chrome.

Krazit: Google isn't saying, at least for now. There's little doubt that online video is a crucial component of the future Web (CBS' David Poltrack is telling television critics this week that big money is coming to online video), and something will need to assume a role as the future technology enabler of Web video.

In the end, however, it must be nice to be able to make $100 million bets with relative ease. Nothing could come of On2's technology, and Google would hardly be worse off than it was a day ago.

Updated 1:24 p.m. PDT with new information about Flash licensing and YouTube expenses.

Features that Google brought to its developer preview version of Chrome--themes, a revamped new-tab page, a tweaked Omnibox for searching and entering Web addresses, and support for HTML 5 video--have now arrived on the browser's better tested beta version intended for broader use.

Individually, these features in Chrome 3.0.195.4 (download) are niceties. Collectively, they show Google is steadily moving ahead with its browser project, which was ambitious even before Chrome OS arrived on the scene. Fighting for a piece of the browser market is tough, but offering an operating system solely for Web-based applications is a lot tougher.

Chrome themes, such as this one called Grass, are in the new Chrome beta.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

After some on-again, off-again wavering, I've gone back to Chrome as my default browser. I like its interface and a handful of features, but the main advantage is its priority on speed. Google's Chrome ambition is to improve the Web as a foundation for applications and more generally to get people to do more online, and speed is of the essence.

That's why the shiny new features such as Chrome themes actually are less interesting to me than some of the fine print in Google's announcement of the new beta:

Beyond the improvements in JavaScript execution in this latest beta, there are a host of other improvements that should help Google Chrome make the most of your network connection. For example, when you open a new Web page while other Web pages are still loading, Google Chrome is now smarter about prioritizing the requests for the new page--for instance, fetching text, images, and video for your new page--ahead of the requests from the older pages. Loading pages on this beta release should also be faster than ever with DNS caching, more efficient DOM bindings, and using V8 for proxy auto-config.

OK, so that gets deep in the weeds at the end there, but suffice it to say that Google is tackling browser speed in a number of areas, not just its V8 engine for executing Web programs written in JavaScript.

Google gets dinged with some justification for moving sluggishly with Chrome. The Mac OS X and Linux versions are only now beginning to come into their own, for example. But there's a subtext to that criticism that bears mentioning.

Specifically, it looks to me as if some perceptions are shifting from "Why should I bother with Chrome?" to "Google isn't moving fast enough with Chrome." That shows expectations are shifting in Google's favor. It positions the company better to win over converts through the gradual delivery of extensions and other high-demand features.

Of course, a lot of my feedback is from change-embracing early adopters who care, sometimes passionately, about browsers. Getting Chrome to appeal to mainstream folks will be another, harder challenge for Google.

Apparently, organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful will require a new operating system.

Google has long worked on expanding its reach beyond mere Internet search. And as many had suspected, it confirmed late Tuesday night that it plans to develop a lightweight operating system based on Linux and Web standards for personal computers.

Why? Well, Google's standard response to any question about why it's working on something other than search is to declare that any product that helps people get on the Web, and enjoy their experience on the Web, benefits Google's advertising customers in that more Web users equals more Google searches.

Yet, Chrome OS represents something more. There's a competitive impact that can't be ignored, no matter how often Google insists that it's in this world to do good rather than inflict pain on other corporations.

Few details were available Wednesday concerning one of the most important and ambitious projects Google has ever undertaken. Sources familiar with the Chrome OS project say Google engineers have only been working on the project in earnest since the beginning of the year, so there's likely a lot that still needs to be ironed out.

Chrome OS is the byproduct of Google thinking it can do better than Windows, Mac OS X, the various flavors of Linux, and even its own Android operating system. It's long been obvious that the world has changed from a personal computing model built for individuals working offline or businesspeople sharing files across a workplace to one where the consumer/business lines have blurred and people are expected to be online anywhere and everywhere.

Accompanying that shift has been the decreasing importance of processing power and operating system complexity. For years, the dirty secret of the computer industry has been that most people don't use nearly the amount of headroom provided to them by modern microprocessors and operating systems.

After all, if you're searching the Web, sending e-mail, typing up documents, touching up photos, and updating your Facebook status--hardly an uncommon usage model--you're more concerned with speed and battery life than raw power. Those still playing Doom or editing video will always need something more robust, but most people do spend an awful lot of time in the browser and have embraced smartphones and Netbooks as a way of staying online on the go.

Google's general idea seems to be twofold. First, it wants to make it easier for regular people to use a computer by making an operating system that is fast, secure, and lightweight enough to run on portable devices.

Sources familiar with Google's plans for the Chrome OS said that the company is working on a new method of "windowing," or switching between multiple applications. Google also believes that the whole idea of storing your files and applications in folders is an archaic way of organizing your data, and plans to unveil a new user interface that handles things a little differently.

Secondly, Google believes that through the use of Web standards like HTML 5--promoted heavily during its recent Google I/O conference as the development platform of the future--software development on a browser-based OS will be easily understood by developers reared in the Web 2.0 era.

This is not a new idea. Palm is betting its future on such a strategy, having introduced WebOS on the Palm Pre as a Web-friendly development environment based on a browser engine running atop Linux. Sound familiar?

Google's Chrome OS could be running on Netbooks such as these by the second half of 2010.

(Credit: CNET)

Google brings much more to bear than Palm, however. It has an entire suite of Web applications and services that already form much of what you want a computer to do: send e-mail, compose documents, edit photos, and, of course, browse the Web.

But why does Google think it needs two operating systems to address this evolving usage model? Much of the language used to introduce Chrome OS could have been pulled from a blog post two years ago introducing Android, Google's lightweight Linux-based open-source smartphone operating system.

Just a few months ago Google's Andy Rubin declared Android to be "a revolution" that would help Google conquer the write-once, run-anywhere goal that has eluded the non-Microsoft software community for so many years. And Google executives have endorsed the concept of other companies building things other than phones based on Android.

However, Android appears to now occupy a different role in Google's thinking. According to Tuesday night's blog post, "Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems."

As noted, there are an awful lot of details that still need to surface before we can glean Google's true intent with Chrome OS, not to mention the potential impact. Google said it plans to release the code for Chrome OS later this year, with the expectation that devices based on the OS could arrive in the second half of 2010.

But one thing is for sure: Google's ambitions are boundless. The company is proposing to do nothing less than rewrite the rules that govern personal computing.

XHTML 2, we hardly knew you.

XHTML 2, a technology intended to build a more powerful Web from the ground up, met a quiet end last week, spotlighting the difficulties of standardization in a fast-moving Internet. Introduced in 2002, XHTML 2 was a centerpiece of standards work at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

But incompatibility with the existing Web and a direction at odds with Web developers' desires doomed it to a slow demise. On Thursday, after a long reconciliation with browser makers who'd struck off in a different direction, the W3C announced that it will wind down development of XHTML 2 this year.

Ultimately, Web browser makers had the upper hand in charting the Web's future.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Instead, the group will channel those resources into standardizing what the browser makers have been toiling on all these years: HTML 5, a sprawling collection of new features to improve the present Hypertext Markup Language. Although elements of XHTML 2 will live on in HTML 5, overall, the browser makers prevailed.

"XHTML 2 was a beautiful specification of philosophical purity that had absolutely no resemblance to the real world," said Bruce Lawson, HTML 5 evangelist for browser maker Opera.

So what went wrong? In short, the Web has many masters, but the ones with final say over its nature are those who build it page by page, not the standards group trying to create a new foundation.

XHTML 2 was designed to reform the Web as a medium for publishing documents, but the developers--and the browser makers who listened closely to those developers--instead wanted a platform for interactive applications. And while that direction prevailed, its incarnation in HTML 5 faces its own set of challenges now.

The consensus for HTML 5 support has been building for years, and the W3C already had been increasing its involvement in its standardization well before it decided to put an end to much of the competing XHTML 2 standard. Although the HTML-XHTML split has been fractious at times, there's inescapable tension between standards groups trying to chart the future and vendors whose products relate to those standards.

"I will not say it's been the smoothest way of doing things, but it's not an unnatural way for things to proceed," said Mike Smith, leader of HTML work at W3C, speaking of the reconciliation process that rejuvenated the W3C's HTML work. "Vendors are the ones who drive innovation on the Web for the most part."

Why XHTML?
So if it's so clear today that HTML 5 is the way to go, why was so much energy, time, and research invested in XHTML 2? It was an attempt start afresh without HTML's shortcomings.

The X in XHTML stands for XML, which in turn stands for Extensible Markup Language. XML is a broad technology that uses a strict set of tags to label different types of content in a document, and XHTML was engineered specifically for the Web. XHTML brought rigor to the loosey-goosey and slap-dash world of HTML, and it would have permitted developers to employ a broader range of computing engines called parsers to digest and process the XML, Smith said.

XHTML "was a cleaner and better-architected version of HTML," Smith said. And in its earlier years, it had support. "At the time when XHTML 2 was first conceived and specified in the early drafts, most everybody thought it was a good idea. A lot of people in hindsight want to look back at it now and make the claim that they knew it wasn't going to have success," Smith said.

XHTML 2.0 made it to working draft stage, but only parts of the specification will live on in HTML 5.

One example of its utility is the tight coupling of textual information with a graphs encoded with the SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics format, Smith said. Another advantage was better browsing with the limited abilities of mobile phones.

One of the big problems with XHTML 2 was that it wasn't backwards compatible, though. Not only could it not be used to display existing Web pages, but Web browsers had to be expanded with an entirely new engine for handling the XML. Notably, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the dominant browser by far, couldn't handle XHTML on its own.

Another problem was that there was plenty of demand for improvements to HTML, which W3C had declared finished with version 4.01 in 1999.

"People were so focused on XHTML 2 that they were substantially less interested in modifying the application model and introducing new features to HTML that developers were clamoring for," said Arun Ranganathan, standards evangelist for Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser. "We felt the standards going on at the time...were disconnected from a large majority of developers.

Microsoft agrees with its browser rival.

"We've never heard a strong request from our developer audience and customers for XHTML 2," said Amy Barzdukas, general manager for IE.

Enter WHATWG
One crucial moment came five years ago when Opera and Mozilla representatives showed the W3C an idea called WebForms for improving HTML. "We jointly presented this paper to W3C, who rejected it," Lawson said.

Mozilla's Brendan Eich and Opera's Ian Hickson were displeased with how things went. "The best way to help the Web is to incrementally improve the existing web standards," concluded Eich, founder of the JavaScript Web programming language, after the meeting in a blog post.

Eich also announced there an Opera and Mozilla plan to take that evolutionary route. They launched an open e-mail list called WHATWG, short for Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. Apple, which offers its own Safari browser, soon began participating, too.

"It became a de facto standards organization without the formality of W3C. It's where we went to figure out what the future of the Web was," Ranganathan said.

Eventually, the Web-application direction won over the W3C. "Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally," said Web founder and W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee said in 2006.

But Berners-Lee at the time also maintained the commitment to the "well-formed," more rigorous XML-based future: "It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed world, and developing more power in that world."

In practice, the W3C world and WHATWG world involve many of the same people. That probably eased the reconciliation to the current state, where WHATWG and W3C operate simultaneously, the first more informal and the second with more careful handling of intellectual property concerns.

Ultimately, HTML carried the day. What began with interest in more sophisticated Web sites such as eBay blossomed with the arrival of Ajax, which used JavaScript to build more sophisticated Web-based applications. And Web applications weren't just theoretical ideas.

"When Gmail and Google Maps and Ajax came along, it became really clear we needed a new set of technologies that made it easier to make those kinds of applications," Smith said.

The transition culminated with W3C's bare-bones news last week: "Today the director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed. By doing so, and by increasing resources in the HTML Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate the progress of HTML 5 and clarify W3C's position regarding the future of HTML."

Some features of XHTML 2 will be built into HTML 5, so the XHTML 2 work won't have been for naught, assuming a critical mass of browser makers do in fact include the necessary XML parser along the HTML parser.

HTML 5: no walk in the park
Though the W3C-WHATWG dust has mostly settled, the standard is far from finished, and indeed looks a long way off.

The present approach involves a give and take between browser makers trying out new features and the standards group codifying them. Features can't make it to the ultimate W3C state, "final recommendation," until at least two browsers support the feature compatibly, Smith said.

In practice, that means adventurous Web developers who choose to support the new technologies in effect are blessing them even though the technology might well change.

HTML 5 elements came from all over. Canvas, which involves two-dimensional graphics, began at Apple's Safari and now has won over Opera, Firefox, and Google's Chrome. ContentEditable, which lets Web pages be edited in place, came from Microsoft. Google now is working on a faster communication feature called Web Sockets. Programmers for WebKit, the open-source project underlying Safari, are developing DataGrid, which brings spreadsheet-like tables with sorting and editing to Web pages.

"The speed of the web is continuing to pick up in general," Barzdukas said. HTML 5 feature support figures prominently in the browser sales pitches from Google and from Mozilla, with its "upgrade the Web" tag line for Firefox 3.5.

Actual standardization, though, remains distant. Mozilla's Ranganathan hopes for drafts of some HTML 5 elements this year and a draft of the full specification in 2010.

The HTML 5 built-in video situation is illustrative. Hickson, the HTML 5 editor and now Google employee, posted a lament about HTML 5 video last week because browser makers don't agree on whether to support the patent-free Ogg Theora format, preferred by Opera and Mozilla, or the commercially popular H.264 format, preferred by Google and Apple. The upshot for now: HTML 5 is trying to standardize video but doesn't specify which format to be used.

That pace of HTML 5 standardization important, given the importance Microsoft places on supporting actual standards and the company's commanding market share.

"The support of ratified standards (that Web developers) can use is something that we are extremely supportive of," Barzdukas said. "In some cases, it can be premature to start claiming support for standards that are not yet in fact standards."