"The current best estimate for final delivery is 2022," the source told ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet UK last week.
Officially speaking, HTML 5 is on track to "reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012", but the source said the target is off by around a decade. It's already been 12 years since HTML 4.0 hit its W3C Candidate Recommendation stage.
The idea of HTML 5's final publication being so far off is both bad news and, in some ways, irrelevant. The new generation of Web standards is crucial for widgets and, perhaps more importantly, handling Web video sans Flash, but it doesn't require final publication to start being used. Elements of HTML 5 have already found their way into Internet Explorer 8 and the latest version of Chrome.