HTML5 or HTML 5?

I have known for sometime there is a difference between HTML5 and HTML 5 (note the space) but never been certain. Thanks to ‘HTML5 for Web Designers’ by Jeremy Keith this has now been clarified and for those who do not have this book I thought I would share the differences.

HTML 5
HTML 5 was originally developed along with XHTML 2 by W3C. This was due to W3C believing that HTML was finished after HTML version 4 and so they began working on XHTML 2; a language designed to lead the web to a bright new XML-based future and not provide any backward compatibility.

This was a disaster.

As a result, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a blog post in 2006 announcing their intentions of rapidly moving the web forward were simply not working.

HTML5
As a result of the decision to produce XHTML 2, a rebellion formed within the W3C including representatives from Opera, Safari and Mozilla proposing the idea of extending HTML to allow for the creation of Web Applications. This proposal was rejected.

As a result they formed their own group: WHATWG (the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) and set about working on extending HTML. Over time they merged their specifications into one sinlgle specification called HTML5. HTML5 is now the basis for any future version of HTML, as admitted by W3C themselves and HTML5 is also used as a basis for one of the W3C specifications.

I definitely recommend the book ‘HTML5 for Web Designers’ and I would like to thank all authors and contributes for putting together such a fantastic book.