Upvoted. You are correct. HTML5 is not yet even approved W3C candidate recommendation.
To be more accurate Apple should have said that it is committed in implementing HTML5 standard, not that it has done it, because at the moment HTML5 is not ready.
From Wikipedia: "Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, expects the specification to reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012, and W3C Recommendation in the year 2022 or later. However, many parts of the specification are stable and may be implemented in products"
2022? Then those guys move too slow to be useful. Good on Jobs for trying to force it to move at a more reasonable pace. There is no reason to wait so long.
For a spec to become a REC today, it requires two 100% complete and fully interoperable implementations, which is proven by each successfully passing literally thousands of test cases (20,000 tests for the whole spec would probably be a conservative estimate)
The candidate recommendation phase, which WHATWG expects to happen next year is a much more relevant date. That aside I do wonder if this level of effort isn't just wasted pedantry.
Ian is not saying people should wait until 2022. That quote is taken out of context.
He was saying that it is useful well before it is an official recommendation. He is a member of the WHAT-WG and Apple was one of the founding members so what he's saying is pretty much in lock-step with apple and the webkit team.
Many browsers still do not support full css2 support. Why should we expect full css3 support? Thats why the 2022 seems so far away. It states FULL support not partial like most all browsers currently do.
To be more accurate Apple should have said that it is committed in implementing HTML5 standard, not that it has done it, because at the moment HTML5 is not ready.
From Wikipedia: "Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, expects the specification to reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012, and W3C Recommendation in the year 2022 or later. However, many parts of the specification are stable and may be implemented in products"