The future of HTML

This panel discussion will take a hard look at the future of HTML. The W3C’s efforts to promote XHTML and XML-based standards such as XForms have not met the success that some earlier W3C standards have had, and meanwhile, some standards developed outside of the W3C have started to gain some support among browsers and in the user community. The best-known such effort thus far is probably the Web Forms 2.0 standard developed by the WHATWG and now supported in Mozilla, Opera, and Safari. But the microformats community has also had some successes in gaining greater user and browser support for microformats. Alos, the rechartering of the W3C HTML working group, and the discussion around that, are signs that work on the future of HTML may be quite a bit more complicated than it has been in the past, and possibly require much greater engagement of the user and developers communities.

This panel will consist of representatives from W3C working groups, from browser vendors, and from the WHATWG and the microformats community. The discussion will be free-form, moving in whatever directions the questions and comments from attendees take it.