Page 1: News Post
And the internet will already be using HTML5 for some time before that. The HTML5 final release will be in 2014 and WHATWG wants to move to versionless living specifications. That doesn't work.
Thankfully, W3C handles the specification naming and such.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20031673-264.html
Quote
Likely by the end of 2011, the W3C will issue a second last-call version and begin a second round of refinements.
In the second quarter of 2012, a new phase begins, in which "implementors" of the specification--browser makers, essentially--provide feedback. During this phase, the W3C concentrates on a suite of thousands of tests to see if implementations of HTML5 really do get the same results when interpreting a Web page's code.
The culmination of this phase is a "candidate recommendation" of the HTML5 spec and at least two "interoperable implementations"--in other words, two different browsers that produce the same results on the test cases. The implementors' feedback is scheduled for completion by the first quarter of 2014.
Thankfully, W3C handles the specification naming and such.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20031673-264.html