The Story Behind W3C Adopting HTML5

W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), the body which looks after web standards was at a time far behind XHTML 2.0 as they wanted the web to be standardized and be more stricter as well. But what browser vendors observed was that no one was doing XHTML properly, and very few people were doing XHTML development. The ones who were doing it weren't doing it properly. So, the standard had no relevance when no one did it properly. So, an evolution of HTML was needed, which makes sure that current realities of development are taken care of. For example many people forget a tag, and that is forgiven by a browser. We needed to make such cases standardized now. So, all these things had to be taken care of as an evolution of HTML. That's why Opera, Mozilla and Apple came together to form a group called the WHATWG (WHAT working group) and they came up with a standard called Web Application 1.0, which was the defining moment of HTML5. The developer community was behind HTML5 instead of XHTML 2.0.

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The W3C saw this and said they'll discontinue their work on XHTML 2.0 and will adopt HTML5 as new version of HTML. This is how the W3C adopted HTML5, to which they were initially against. But on seeing most developer community following HTML5, they then adopted the standard as the next step for HTML.