The revelation in Don Sheppard’s post that there standards are being developed by ISO for Distributed Application Platform and services including Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Cloud Computing got me thinking about HTML 5. Hugh Chatfield discusses XML here.

This reason came about because of my interest in video content for web pages, an area dominated by Adobe, Google, and Apple. A technology and investment colleague of mine alerted me on HTML 5′s development

It turns out that no standards currently exist for HTML 5. While looking into what standards actually do exist, W3C came to mind, but this opened up a hole can of worms. On their blog site, the article entitled HTML5 isn’t a standard yet generated enormous controversy not on HTML5, but on W3C itself.

A controversy also exists in which governing bodies should dictate/oversee/enforce standards. The topic is so contentious that the word “standards” needed to be used with quotes:

See: http://www.w3.org/QA/2009/05/_watching_the_google_io.html

To pre-complicate matters, preceding HTML 5 was XHTML or ‘HTML 4.’ What happened to the XHTML line?

What’s Next?

Ian Hickson (from Google) is co-authoring the specifications for HTML 5. It is no wonder that Google Chrome is including HTML 5 in the article ‘Chrome 5 becomes the Flash browser, integrates plug-in with dev build.’

Coders, until now, frustrated with the lack of resolution for standards, will need to continue to embed code that may or may not work, depending on the web browser used by the consumer.

As a blogger reading about standards and recommendations in detail for the first time,  it is difficult to understand why so much discussion needed to decide on how to add a video to a web page.

It’s especially difficult as a newbie blogging about this to comprehend that much chatter and time is being taken to decide on the element:

<VIDEO>

</VIDEO>

Until a decision is made for HTML 5, consumers will need to install “plug ins” to be able to view videos embedded on web pages.

The drama does not end here. A future investigation about Google partnering with Adobe (even a writeup on Adobe (Air)) in the face of HTML 5 standardization will prove to generate fruitful discoveries.