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Ongoing

At a recent W3C Advisory Committee meeting (member only link) there is a session where the HTML WG co-chairs reported to the W3C membership on the Working Group's status and progress. Our presentation was based on our HTML WG status report.

Other ongoing activities include:

Charter

The current HTML working group charter was issued on 7 March 2007. The group is chartered to continue its work through 31 December 2010.

See also W3C Relaunches HTML Activity press release and Architectural vision behind the HTML/XHTML2/Forms Chartering as well as pre-charter discussion such as Reinventing HTML: Update and HTML and Forms Activities Proposals (Call for Review) to W3C Members, and XHTML 2 Working Group Expected to Stop Work End of 2009, W3C to Increase Resources on HTML 5.

Specification

The HTML 5 draft specification was published as a First Public Working Draft on 23 January 2008 and several updated Working Drafts of the specification have subsequently been published by the group. The current editor’s draft of the HTML 5 specification is also available.

If you’re interested in tracking changes to the editor’s draft, a variety of mechanisms are available:

Milestones

Please refer to the HTML Working Status report.

Membership and Participation

The HTML working group encourages active participation from a diverse community, including content authors and content providers, web developers, implementors (of browsers, authoring tools, conformance checkers, etc.) and anyone interested in helping to evolve the HTML language. A full list of participants is available. A number of HTML working-group members answered a background experience and expertise survey.

By charter, we operate primarily by email (see public-html archive), supplemented by web-based surveys, occasional teleconferences and up to two in-person meetings per year.

An issue-tracking task force is appointed by the chairs.

Phone Meetings

Teleconferences are scheduled for Thursdays at 12noon Boston time. An agenda is due to public-html-wg-announce 24 hours in advance; we make heavy use of tracker's agenda page. Minutes are less formal than those of groups that regularly make binding technical decisions in teleconferences; they can be found on the HTML WG Wiki within a day or two.

See Scribe 101 for conventional W3C idioms and tools for using IRC to record meetings.

Face-to-Face Meetings

See also Face to face meeting call for interest concluded, results (80 answers)

IRC

Some participants supplement public-html mailing-list discussions with IRC discussion in the #html-wg channel on irc.w3.org (port 6665 or port 80), with public logs and an informal directory with names and timezones.

Mailing lists

While the primary mailing list for the HTML Working Group is public-html, we're using several other ones for the task forces, announcements, or issue trackings. A full list of all HTML Working Group related mailing lists is available.

How to join

This Working Group operates under the W3C Patent Policy. The goal of this policy is to assure that Recommendations produced under this policy can be implemented on a Royalty-Free (RF) basis.

In order to carry out the Royalty Free policy, joining the HTML Working Group involves more than typical email subscription:

When you join, you will be subscribed to public-html, the publicly archived mailing-list for the group. Please use the tasks survey to let us know a little bit about yourself and which tasks you're most interested to help with.

This process is somewhat new and novel, and the discussion around it led us to develop Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about Public Invited Experts in the W3C HTML Working Group. For example: I want to participate as an individual in the HTML Working Group but I work for a W3C Member. Why can't I join as an Invited Expert?

Patent Disclosures

W3C maintains a public list of any patent disclosures made in connection with the deliverables of the group; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent.

Tracker

An issue-tracking task force is appointed by the chairs.

The issue-tracking task force is currently using the W3C Tracker for its work. A summary of the status of each issue is being maintained.

Here are some links to specific parts of the Tracker:

The public-html-wg-issue-tracking@w3.org mailing list is the mailing list for the task force, and is publicly archived.

Decision History

The Working Group has a decision policy, and the Group is currently applying it.

See also messages from the chairs such as Decision process: Formal Objections and consensus in the W3C process, on consensus and decision-making, proposal to release "HTML 5 differences from HTML 4" does not carry, and the draft of the decision policy.