
After years as the Web’s standard for organizing webpages and streaming media in browsers, HTML5 has finally become bona fide: The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has put its official stamp of approval on version 5 of the hypertext markup language.
If HTML5 has any claim to fame outside the technology sector, it’s likely late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ doing. He famously threw his weight behind it as an alternative to Adobe’s Flash, whose media player he abhorred.
Walter Isaacson’s biography on Jobs quotes the iPhone mastermind as saying: “Flash is a spaghetti-ball piece of technology that has lousy performance and really bad security problems.” He banned support for it from his company’s smartphone, and single-handedly thrust HTML5 into the spotlight as a more efficient way to serve up native media within mobile Web browsers.
The W3C notes that Gartner dubbed HTML5 one of its top 10 mobile technologies and capabilities for 2015 and 2016—which is interesting, simply because in 2012, it said HTML5 was five to 10 years from becoming suitable for professional use. No matter: It hasn’t stopped many websites and browsers—whether on the desktop, phones or tablets—from now commonly using HTML5 as its building block. Its “write once, deploy anywhere” promise has also been a boon for Web development, across both mobiles and desktops.
To get it finalized, W3C says it collaborated with more than 60 companies and nixed more than 4,000 bugs. Now it feels safe to recommend the markup language for Web developers.
The Next Web dug up this cute little video that the W3C produced to explain why people should care about Web standards like HTML5. Enjoy:
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