Twenty Twenty-Two, Can you wait that long?

There is now a timetable for the release of HTML5, but to tell you the truth... it is practically meaningless. This timetable was provided by [WHATWG] Ian Hickson in a recent interview, and in it he says that: HTML5 will reach ‘Proposed Recommendation’ in the year 2022.

To quote Jeff Croft's recent article, Two Thousand Twenty Two in which he describes his frustration:

I’ve got work to do, here. I don’t have time to sit around reading specs and interviews by spec editors detailing what is going to happen in 13 years. God knows where I’ll be in 13 years. Quite frankly, I’ll be pretty [...] disappointed in myself (and our entire industry) if I’m writing HTML in 13 years. Hell, if I’m still alive in 2022, I’ll think I haven’t been playing hard enough.

2022, that's the year two thousand and twenty two. At the time of writing that's 14 years. 14 years. Sorry that's utterly useless to anyone working today. Its not like a new version was just released, HTML4.1 was recommended in 1999 so it has been around for 9 years and it is painfully obvious that it no longer meets our needs. By my calculations that is 23 years between versions. That is an awfully long time, 1985 was 23 years ago. We are the World was recorded 23 years ago!  How does it take 23 years to release an update to HTML?

Since 1995 Microsoft have released 6 versions of Windows (a mere 13 years). It only takes 7 years to plan an Olympics, London found out we were to host the 2012 games back in 2005. So why is it going to take 23 years?!?!

In a recent Monday by Noon article Jonathan Christopher writes about Current Events: Twenty Twenty Two and You and expresses concern that this timescale does not help the standardisation of web practices. In Google Chrome not Good Enough I have echoed this, we need to have a standard that all browsers can meet, so that as developers and designers we can stop worrying about whether the layout works in IE6 or Firefox and concentrate on making quality websites that adhere to the standards. Sure there are going to be sites that don't work with the new version, but the same is true with any set of regulations we just need to make sure that we are not using tags that have been removed and design for the future not the past. 

I don't see that a website design has a particularly long shelf life, and certainly after 5 years I would expect that any site should be given a facelift at which time it should be possible to update/replace the underlying HTML as well. I can't think of a single example of a site, that hasn't simply been forgotten about, that is still using the same code as 5 years ago. So so-what if the new version of HTML5 means lots of sites need to be re-written to take advantage of it; that's a natural progression and we should embrace it. Everything else in this industry moves and changes so quickly why can't HTML?