W3C Advisory Committee Representatives received today a proposal to republish a series of HTML and XHTML W3C Recommendations as Obsolete Recommendations, in response to a request from the Web Platform Working Group as these specifications are superseded by new versions and are no longer recommended for implementation on the Web platform.

This has been made possible by the addition this year to the W3C Process Document of a process to mark a Recommendation as Obsolete. An obsolete specification is one that the W3C community has decided should no longer be used. For example, it may no longer represent best practices, or it may not have received wide adoption and is not apparently likely to be adopted in the future. The status of an obsolete specification remains active under the W3C Patent Policy, but it is not recommended for future implementation. In this case, “obsolete” states that each of these specifications has been superseded by more recent specifications.

For example, as part of our commitment to the platform’s future, we recommend that all implementers use the latest HTML5 –where HTML5 is the term to refer to the family of specifications. We are proposing to obsolete the particular 28 October 2014 W3C Recommendation which henceforth shall be called HTML 5.0, which has been superseded by HTML 5.1, a W3C Recommendation since 1 November 2016. This aims at clarifying the status of the document and point developers and implementers to the latest version of HTML5.