HTML » HTML Working Group

Charter

The current HTML working group charter was issued on 7 March 2007. The group is chartered to continue its work through 31 December 2010.

The HTML Working Group charter also mandated creation of a Forms Task Force with members from the HTML Working Group and the Forms Working Group. The charter for the Forms Task Force extends through July 2008.

See also W3C Relaunches HTML Activity press release and Architectural vision behind the HTML/XHTML2/Forms Chartering as well as pre-charter discussion such as Reinventing HTML: Update and HTML and Forms Activities Proposals (Call for Review) to W3C Members.

Specification

The HTML 5 draft specification, HTML 5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML was published as a First Public Working Draft on 23 January 2008.

The current editor’s draft of the HTML 5 specification is available from the W3C site and in a multi-page annotated format at the editor’s site.

If you’re interested in tracking changes to the editor’s draft, a variety of mechanisms are available:

• commit-watchers mailing list
• interactive Web interface
• CVS webview
• Subversion interface
• Twitter messages (non-editorial changes only)
• HTML diff with the last version in Subversion

Milestones

The Working Group Schedule of Milestones is:

1. 2007-05 HTML5 and Web Forms 2.0 specs adopted as basis for review
2. 2007-11 HTML Design Principles First Public Working Draft
3. 2008-02 HTML5 First Public Working Draft
4. 2009-03* HTML5 Last Call Working Draft

   * editor's estimate is 2009-10

5. 2009-06 HTML5 Candidate Recommendation
6. 2010-06 HTML5 Proposed Recommendation
7. 2010-09 HTML5 Recommendation

Note: The future dates in the above list are estimates based on the schedule in the charter and are subject to change.

Membership and Participation

The HTML working group encourages active participation from a diverse community, including content authors and content providers, web developers, implementors (of browsers, authoring tools, conformance checkers, etc.) and anyone interested in helping to evolve the HTML language. A full list of participants is available. A number of HTML working-group members answered a background experience and expertise survey.

By charter, we operate primarily by email (see public-html archive), supplemented by web-based surveys, occasional teleconferences and up to two in-person meetings per year.

An issue-tracking task force is appointed by the chairs.

Phone Meetings

Teleconferences happen Thursdays; to facilitate participation from the Americas, Europe, and Asia, the time alternates between 4pm Los Angeles time and 12noon Boston time. An agenda is due to public-html-wg-announce 24 hours in advance; we make heavy use of tracker's agenda page. Minutes are less formal than those of groups that regularly make binding technical decisions in teleconferences; they should be sent to public-html-wg-announce within a day or two. Before the announce mailing list was established, we held teleconferences 2 Aug, 16 Aug, 30 Aug 19 Jul, and 26 April.

How to join

This Working Group operates under the W3C Patent Policy. The goal of this policy is to assure that Recommendations produced under this policy can be implemented on a Royalty-Free (RF) basis.

In order to carry out the Royalty Free policy, joining the HTML Working Group involves more than typical email subscription:

• If you're affiliated with a W3C member organization
  1. Use the form for getting a W3C account
  2. Have your AC representative nominate you using the form for joining this Working Group.
• Otherwise, the process involves getting an account and filling out a form for copyright, patent, etc. policies.

When you join, you will be subscribed to public-html, the publicly archived mailing-list for the group. Please use the tasks survey to let us know a little bit about yourself and which tasks you're most interested to help with.

This process is somewhat new and novel, and the discussion around it led us to develop Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about Public Invited Experts in the W3C HTML Working Group. For example: I want to participate as an individual in the HTML Working Group but I work for a W3C Member. Why can't I join as an Invited Expert?

Note that www-html, a mailing list created in 1994 to discuss HTML, is still available for discussions related to HTML but not in the scope of this Working Group.

Patent Disclosures

W3C maintains a public list of any patent disclosures made in connection with the deliverables of the group; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent.

Issue Tracking

An issue-tracking task force is appointed by the chairs.

The issue-tracking task force is currently using the W3C Tracker for its work. The working criteria for its use of the Tracker as are follows:

The purpose of the group’s Tracker instance is to track high-priority issues that are already under some notable degree of significant discussion within the group — and that are clearly important enough to the group as a whole that we need to more carefully track discussion and decisions around them.

In particular, note that the purpose of the Tracker is explicitly not to provide a means for giving more attention to proposals that have not had as wide an airing as in the group as those proposing them might want for them to have had.

Here are some links to specific parts of the Tracker:

• HTML WG Tracker start page
• angenda-planning page
• open issues
• open actions

The public-html-wg-issue-tracking@w3.org mailing list is the mailing list for the task force, and is publicly archived.