Someone at the W3C made a logo for HTML5. HTML is the format of web pages. It changes. For years, most folks used version 4.01, but lately people have been proposing, coding, and using some new features. It's kind of exciting to see the new functionality rolling out. So, yay, someone at the W3C made a logo. And it looks good!
But I'm a nitpicky nerd, so of course, I focused on the "5". Why HTML5? One of the cool things about the recent work on the HTML spec has been getting rid of the version numbers. That sounds a little strange. In many contexts, version numbers are helpful. Wouldn't you want to know that this web page uses HTML4.01 instead of HTML3.2? Except... it turns out that this browser kinda supports this subset of HTML4.01 and that browser supports that subset, and if you want to make your page look good in all these browsers, you kinda haveta not use this feature and if you use that feature, you sorta gotta tweak it two different ways... As a webmaster, I find myself making decisions: Oh, I could strictly comply with the 4.01 standard... or I could look good in all browsers... but not both. And then you wonder: how many webmasters' days have been wasted worrying about this? How many browser programmers have had to draw big compatibility diagrams? And in the end, webmasters still have to test their pages in the major browsers. The version numbers don't help compatibility but they encourage worrying. Good riddance to them. (Oh hey, the spec writers said this, unsurprisingly, a lot more coherently than I did.)
The lack of a version number implies a standard that ever-evolving. Newly-proposed features popping up; getting nosed around. What would the logo for such a thing look like? I drew this:
![[logo eerily reminiscent of early-web-days Under Construction icon]](http://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/importable/html_under_construction_logo.png){kind=logo}
...where by "drew", I mean that I mangled some vintage art that I found out on the web. It's like one of those "Under Construction" icons from the early days of the web, drawn on a shield-shape like from the HTML5 logo. Or else it's someone in a hole digging him/herself in deeper. You decide.
