The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry group that oversees the development of the specs used on the Web, today announced that the fifth major version of the hypertext markup language specification, HTML5, was today given Recommendation status, W3C's terminology for a final, complete spec.

The last version of HTML was 4.01, released in December 1999, making it almost fifteen years between updates. That's a long time to wait. The story of HTML5's development was a messy affair. After HTML 4.01, W3C embarked on XHTML, an update to HTML that incorporated various XML features such as stricter validation of Web pages and which was intended to make HTML "modular," broken down into a range of sub-specifications.

XHTML wasn't particularly compatible with the real world, however—Web pages that are, per the specs, broken are abundant, and under XHTML rules, browsers should refuse to display such pages entirely—and many in the Web community felt that W3C had lost its way and was irrelevant to the needs of real Web developers.

In particular, Web developers wanted HTML to become a better application platform. With the rise of the smartphone, this need became doubly acute; smartphones needed new HTML (and related) features to accommodate touch input, and smartphones were themselves application platforms with their own proprietary APIs, threatening the Web's role in this area.

A group of companies formed their own breakaway group, WHATWG, that sought to develop HTML in a way that actually matched Web and browser developer needs. WHATWG did much of the initial work of developing HTML5, as W3C's XHTML efforts lost steam.

On the core HTML5 spec, WHATWG and W3C came to an agreement to work together. However, the two groups had and still have a different approach to specification development. On the one hand, WHATWG's specs are "living documents;" works in progress that are never finished or finalized. On the other hand, W3C's specs have more traditional version numbers. W3C's specs also offer somewhat better patent protection, as the W3C participation process requires companies contributing to specs to provide royalty-free licenses for any patents that may cover those specs.

HTML5 aside, W3C and WHATWG continue to squabble about the development of Web-related specifications. W3C continues to insist on producing versioned specifications, leaving it unable to reference WHATWG's work directly. This has led W3C to take work done by WHATWG and use it as the basis for its own work. WHATWG's specs all explicitly permit such usage, but a number of WHATWG contributors have nonetheless complained that W3C has exercised that ability.

Absent some major change of heart, both groups are likely to continue to exist, and both groups will continue to have broad-based industry backing.