HTML5 will be finalized in 2014

According to the W3C, the HTML5 spec will be finalized in 2014 – meaning it will reach Recommendation status in Q4/2014. To maintain this schedule, the W3C has postponed some features to a HTML5.1 spec that is going to be finalized in 2016.

So what does that mean for us developers?
It is always a good thing to have a final spec, but the HTML5 core specification contains only a subset of what is called “HTML5″ today.
It contains some new semantic elements, the audio, video and canvas elements, new form controls and form validation and some APIs, but a lot of stuff is already externalized into separate specifications, like

• HTML Microdata
• HTML Canvas 2D Context
• HTML5 Web Messaging
• Web Workers
• Web Storage
• The WebSocket API
• Server-Sent Events
• WebRTC
• WebVTT

Other specifications are HTML5 extensions, so they are also not included in the core HTML5 spec:

• HTML+RDFa
• DOM Parsing and Serialization
• Shadow DOM
• Web Intents
• Polyglot Markup: HTML-Compatible XHTML Documents
• HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives
• HTML Editing APIs
• HTML Media Capture
• Media Capture and Streams
• Media Fragments URI
• Encrypted Media Extensions
• Media Source Extensions

So when the HTML5 core spec is finalized in 2014, the lives of web developers will become a little bit easier, but they still need to track all the different specs and extensions and decide when it’s time to start using them.
There are two websites that come in handy: HTML5 Please gived advices when specs can be used and caniuse.com shows the browser support of the different specs.