This isn’t precisely fresh news, but in August, Justin James cornered Ian Hickson in a HTML5 Q&A at Tech Republic.

Jeff Croft noticed something in the article that stoked his ire (warning: naughty language).

What about HTML5 could be provocative?

It’s Ian’s timetable for the specification, which started in 2003 and he hopes to have finished by 2022.

No, that’s not a typo. For those of you with mathematics disorders, that’s nineteen years total, with the whole shebang completed fourteen years from now.

I’ll be forty-five.

I’m sorry, but that’s bananas! I don’t care that the last ten years of that schedule is debug/feedback time. I find it inconceivable to think that something else wouldn’t have come along by then, rendering HTML5 irrelevant, as today’s comic posits.

Fourteen years ago the best way to view the web was Mosaic. Remember that?

I do. From high school. I was also playing video games on the Super Nintendo and Lucasarts was producing games that didn’t just involve Indiana Jones or Jar Jar Binks.

A Star Wars prequel trilogy still seemed like a good idea back then.

The fact is that with the pace of software and hardware innovation it seems absurd to assume anything about what the web will be like in another fourteen years. I hope that HTML is a memory by the time 2022 rolls around, replaced by something exciting and unexpected that turns the Internet upside down in the same way the WWW did when it was first conceived. Despite all the foot dragging that software giants have caused in the implementation of standards in the past several years, we can’t allow ourselves to grow complacent and assume that we’ll be using the same playbook after enough time has passed for America to finally get off its lazy butt and return to the moon.

Like Croft says in his post, specs aren’t a bad thing. However, I agree with him that it’s definitely absurd to assume that HTML5 will be relevant by the time they hit the end of their projected road.

I’m excited for HTML5, but by the time they put the stamp ‘done’ on it, I predict it’ll be an artifact of Internet history. But then, that seems to be how the W3C works, rather than creating standards they’re just putting the seal of approval on what’s already happened.

That said, some wit has made a convenient countdown clock for those of you that want to keep dibs on the spec’s progress.