The 2022 date has been widely misunderstood. HTML5 is scheduled to reach "last call working draft" in October 2009 - that is one year from now. No substantial c

The 2022 date has been widely misunderstood. HTML5 is scheduled to reach "last call working draft" in October 2009 - that is one year from now. No substantial change to the spec is expected to happen after this. This may actually be an optimistic timline considering the size of of the HTML5 spec. However, HTML5 is going to go where no W3C spec has gone before: They want to create extensive test suites for all parts of the spec. This is going to be a large undertaking becuse the spec is large and defines a lot of things which is left undefined in earlier specs - e.g. error handling in HTML parsing, which is undefined in HTML4 but is defined in detail in HTML5. The 2022 date is when it is expected that two complete and interoperable implementations of the spec will exist. This date is of course pure guesswork - when/if this will be achieved depends on the browser developers, not the WHATWG. It may be optimistic to hope that it will ever happen. As far as I know there is not one complete implementation of either HTML4 or CSS2 a decade after the finalization of the specs - much less two completely interoperable implementations.