News in Detail

W3C's new logo promotes HTML5--and more

Underscoring the confluence of technology, politics, and marketing, the World Wide Web Consortium today unveiled a new logo for HTML5.

With the logo, the W3C wants to promote the new Web technology--and itself. The Web is growing far beyond its roots of housing static Web sites and is transforming into a vehicle for entertainment and a foundation for online applications.

The W3C hopes the logo--T-shirts and stickers with it already are on sale--will fuel excitement and interest in the refurbished Web. "In addition to work on the specification, test suites, and useful materials for developers, we seek to raise awareness about W3C technology and to promote adoption of W3C standards," spokesman Ian Jacobs said.

Curiously, though, the standards group--the very people one might expect to have the narrowest interpretation of what exactly HTML5 means--instead say it stands for a swath of new Web technologies extending well beyond the next version of Hypertext Markup Language.

And some Web developers aren't happy about that. Web developer Jeremy Keith wrote today that the W3C just helped push HTML5 "into the linguistic sewer of buzzwordland."

Here's how the W3C put it: "The logo is a general-purpose visual identity for a broad set of open Web technologies, including HTML5, CSS, SVG, WOFF, and others," the W3C said in the FAQ about the HTML5 logo, referring to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for formatting and graphical effects, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for advanced 2D graphics, and the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) for elaborate typography. "In addition to the HTML5 logo there are icons for eight high-level technology classes enabled by the HTML5 family of technologies. The icons can be used to highlight more specific abilities, such as offline, graphics, or connectivity."

Using "HTML5" to represent technologies well beyond the standard itself doesn't sit well with some developers who see a useful role in more precise terms. Bruce Lawson, an employee of browser maker Opera and co-author of a book on HTML5, has proposed the acronym NEWT--new exciting Web technologies

"Basically: #HTML5 logo = good thing. But disappointed to see CSS 3 conflated into it," Lawson tweeted today, pointing to his rather amusingly theatrical YouTube video about it.

His case was likely something of a lost cause, though, even before the W3C itself offered a logo naming a specific standard to stand instead for a range of technologies. Apple, a company with vastly more marketing skill than most, launched an HTML5 showcase last year that extended well beyond HTML5--indeed it was probably better classified as a demonstration of new CSS than new HTML. There's a reason that marketing types preferred the broad definition of HTML5: it's hard to get people to understand a long series of acronyms from standards groups. And it seems unlikely Apple's promotional experts would get excited about an amphibian.