HTML draft version timeline

                         HTML draft version timeline

October 1991

 HTML Tags, an informal document (cern) that lists 18 HTML tags, was first    mentioned in  public.

June 1992

 First informal draft of the DTD HTML, with several subsequent  revisions     (July 15, August 6, August 18, November 17, November 19,   November 20, November 22)

November 1992

 HTML DTD (the first with a version number, based on RCS revisions,     starting instead of 1.0), an informal draft.

June 1993 

 The IETF IIIR Working Group published the Hypertext Markup Language as an     Internet draft (an approximate proposal for a standard). It was replaced by a second     version a month later

November 1993

  HTML + was published by the IETF as an Internet draft and was a competitive       proposal to the hypertext markup language draft. It expired in July 1994.

November 1994

First draft (revision 00) of HTML 2.0 published by the IETF itself (called "HTML 2.0" of revision 02), which ultimately led to the publication of RFC 1866 in November 1995.

April 1995 (author March 1995)

HTML 3.0 was proposed as a standard for the IETF, but the proposal expired five months later (September 28, 1995) without further action. It included many of the capabilities that were in Raggett's HTML + proposal, such as table support, text flow around figures, and the display of complex mathematical formulas.

W3C started developing its own Arena browser as a test bed for HTML 3 and Cascading Style Sheets, but HTML 3.0 was unsuccessful for various reasons. The draft was considered very large, at 150 pages, and the pace of development of the browser, as well as the number of stakeholders, had exceeded the resources of the IETF. Browser providers, including Microsoft and Netscape at the time, chose to implement different subsets of draft HTML 3 features, as well as introduce their own extensions (see Browser Wars). These included extensions to control the stylistic aspects of documents, contrary to the "belief [of the academic engineering community] that things like text color, background texture, font size, and font face they were definitely beyond the reach of a language when their sole intention was to specify how a document would be organized. " Dave Raggett, who has been a member of the W3C for many years, has commented, for example, "To some extent, Microsoft built its business on the Web by expanding HTML functionality."

HTML5 official logo

Html draft version timeline

January 2008

HTML5 was released as a working draft by the W3C.

  Although its syntax closely resembles that of SGML, HTML5 has     abandoned any attempt to be an SGML application and has explicitly   defined its own "html" serialization, in addition to an alternative XML-based   XHTML5 serialization.

HTML5 2011 - Last call

On February 14, 2011, the W3C expanded the status of its HTML Working Group with clear milestones for HTML5. In May 2011, the working group advanced HTML5 to "Last Call", an invitation to communities inside and outside of W3C to confirm the technical strength of the specification. The W3C developed a comprehensive test suite to achieve broad interoperability for the full specification in 2014, which was the target date for the recommendation. In January 2011, the WHATWG changed the name of its standard of living "HTML5" to "HTML". However, the W3C continues its project to launch HTML5.

HTML5 2012 - Candidate recommendation

In July 2012, WHATWG and W3C decided on a degree of separation. W3C will continue the HTML5 specification work, focusing on a single definitive standard, which WHATWG regards as a "snapshot". The WHATWG organization will continue its work with HTML5 as a "standard of living". The concept of a standard of living is that it is never complete and is always updated and improved. New features can be added, but features will not be removed.

In December 2012, HTML5 was designated as a candidate recommendation. The criterion for advancing to the recommendation is "two 100% complete and fully interoperable implementations"

HTML5 2014 - Proposed Recommendation and Recommendation

In September 2014, the W3C moved HTML5 to the proposed Recommendation. On October 28, 2014, HTML5 was released as a stable W3C Recommendation, which means that the specification process is complete.