The Worldwide Web Consortium launched a new logo and marketing campaign for HTML5 on January 18, and Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon.
The proposed HTML5 logo “is a general-purpose visual identity for a broad set of open web technologies, including HTML5, CSS, SVG, WOFF, and others,” according to the FAQ page. However, the logo “does not imply validity or conformance,” the W3C noted.
The W3C is encouraging vendors, Web-site/app developers and others to use the logo on their sites, t-shirts and stickers to raise the visibility of HTML5. If the community embraces the logo, W3C “will adopt it as its own official logo for HTML5 in the first quarter of 2011,” the FAQ page said.
Microsoft is planning to promote the logo immediately on “the major Microsoft HTML5 properties,” including the IE 9 test drive site and its associated Beauty of the Web site. The W3C site lists html5rocks.com, Modernizr and “a host of other sites and apps” as being early advocates for the new logo and/or its component parts.
“The logo program is an important step forward to raise awareness that parts of HTML5 are being used by real sites today. While there is still a lot of discussion about when HTML5 will be ready, the reality is that HTML5 consists of a broad range of technologies. Some are very stable, and some are in early working drafts and changing rapidly. The stable parts of HTML5 can safely be used today,” said a Microsoft spokesperson via e-mail.
Microsoft is expected to release a near-final Release Candidate test build of Internet Explorer 9 any week now. IE 9 is Microsoft’s most standards-compliant version of its Web browser. Microsoft officials are continuing to decline to provide a release-to-Web target for the final version, but many are expecting that to happen in the first part of this year, possibly timed with the Microsoft Mix ‘11 conference in April.
Microsoft’s latest corporate stance is that HTML5, not Silverlight, is the company’s cross-platform play. Because HTML5 is evolving, Silverlight will likely continue to find adoption as not just a development platform, but also a cross-platform runtime for some time to come.
