I was impressed by something Mark Pilgrim wrote in his Dive into HTML 5:

I am extraordinarily fascinated with all aspects of this almost-17-year-old conversation that led to the creation of an HTML element that has been used on virtually every web page ever published. Consider:

  • HTTP still exists. HTTP successfully evolved from 0.9 into 1.0 and later 1.1. And still it evolves.
  • HTML still exists. That rudimentary data format — it didn’t even support inline images! — successfully evolved into 2.0, 3.2, 4.0. HTML is an unbroken line. A twisted, knotted, snarled line, to be sure. There were plenty of “dead branches” in the evolutionary tree, places where standards-minded people got ahead of themselves (and ahead of authors and implementors). But still. Here we are, in 2010, and web pages from 1990 still render in modern browsers. I just loaded one up in the browser of my state-of-the-art Android mobile phone, and I didn’t even get prompted to “please wait while importing legacy format…”
  • Some of the same people are still around and still involved in what we now simply call “web standards.” That’s after almost 20 years. And some were involved in predecessors of HTML, going back into the 1980s and before.

It’s crazy to think that a single generation has watched what was once just a cool idea develop into a worldwide publishing platform that revolutionized communication and commerce. And it still works off of the same backwards-compatible standard.

That’s a marvel of collaboration.

I’m getting excited about what HTML 5 will bring. It will make it easier for the blind to navigate websites. It will give us new options for including images, audio, and video in our pages. And it won’t mess up existing pages.

Pretty remarkable.