A new HTML5 rift? Not quite

Nobody ever said it was easy having two groups writing the same standard for building Web pages.

But what looked like new divergence between the two groups that create the HTML standard surfaced last week probably shouldn't be taken as evidence of new problems in the process.

HTML standard editor and Google employee Ian "Hixie" Hickson sent ripples across the Web standards world when he described an HTML standard "fork" that involves new separation between the versions of HTML maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and by the Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group (WHATWG). Specifically, where Hickson previously was editor of both organizations' version of the standard, he's now just editor of the WHATWG version, he said.

The changes mean "we are now independent of the W3C HTML Working Group again, while still maintaining a working relationship with the W3C," Hickson said.

Browser makers Opera and Mozilla founded WHATWG years ago when the W3C concluded HTML wasn't worth further development; the W3C got involved again after its alternative, XHTML 2.0, failed to catch on. The fruit of this work is HTML5, which technically refers to a new version of the Hypertext Markup Language that governs how programmers describe Web pages but which in practice also embraces a variety of other HTML and other Web standards.

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