The World Wide Web consortium (W3C (News – Alert)), the not-for-profit organization that creates the standards that govern the Web, has announced that it will finalize the HTML5 draft standard.

The W3C will release a formal specification for HTML 5.0 in 2014. The organization expects to follow with version 5.1 in 2016. The last version of HTML, version 4.01, was released in 1999, well before the rise of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter (News – Alert). By the time the standard is fully recommended, this will amount to a total of 15 years between versions.

HTML5 includes features to make Web applications work more like desktop applications, including animation, video, and the ability to save data to users’ devices. Although the standard is still a draft, a number of websites are already experimenting with it. Apple (News – Alert), Google and Microsoft are among the companies contributing to the effort.

The goal of the standard is to achieve more modularity, instead of the “kitchen sink” approach HTML standards have favored in the past. The W3C has already spun a number of technologies, such as Web Workers, Web Storage and Websocket, into their own documents.

“Splitting out separate specifications allows those technologies to be advanced by their respective communities of interest, allowing more productive development of approaches that may eventually be able reach broader consensus,” the W3C said.

By splitting off features, the W3C can concentrate on a set of core technologies that software vendors and others can easily implement. This will also allow the W3C to release a test suite to test feature compatibility and interoperability. This process will last at least 18 months.

Ian Hickson backed away from editing the HTML5 standard to concentrate on the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), but the W3C added four editors to keep the standardization effort on track.

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