Section I.9. Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG)

I.9. Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG)

Impatient with the progress of the W3C in reaching agreement about standards for rich Internet applications, several industry participants started a separate group to develop standards that extend HTML for practical usage. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (http://www.whatwg.org) has created a specification called Web Applications 1.0 (sometimes informally referred to as HTML 5). Although the specification is still in working draft stage, several parts are sufficiently finalized to have been implemented in a few recent browser versions.

As the name implies, Web Applications 1.0's goal is to define new or improved features built into browsers that make the job of creating rich Internet applications easier for the developer. The standard builds on existing HTML, XHTML, and DOM standards to add features such as self-validating forms (codified under the banner of Web Forms 2.0), user-modifiable tables (e.g., adding rows to a dynamic order form), dynamically drawable canvas regions, script-controllable audio, and more. The canvas element, for example, is now built into Mozilla, Safari, and Opera browsers, while support for Web Forms 2.0 and the Audio object exist in Opera 9.