The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced that a final recommendation for HTML 5.0 will be released in the 4th quarter of 2014. In spite of the "recommendation" terminology that W3C uses, this is official release of HTML5. This is a big deal and great news. Browser developers will have a firm definition of
HTML5 they can use to bring their products up to a complete level of support for this latest version of HTML.
W3C has also defined the follow-on version, HTML 5.1, to be released in the 4th quarter of 2016. This release will include features that have been pushed out in order to get release 5.0 completed in 2014. Without this stragegy, W3C was looking at an indefinite specification development timeframe.
Browser developers are not waiting for 2014 to begin implementation of HTML5. You can use www.html5test.com to check the status of your browser to see which features are supported and www.caniuse.com for a summary of the status of support by all the major browsers.