What is the status of HTML5 Database?

Question

This spec http://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/ says:

This document was on the W3C Recommendation track but specification work has stopped. The specification reached an impasse: all interested implementors have used the same SQL backend (Sqlite), but we need multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path.

Does this mean that HTML5 database is going away, and for some time we will have a de-facto standard using SQLite, possibly with browser differences? Or has the W3C published a plan of attack for finishing the standard?

Answer 1

According to this article:

[...] we think it is worth explaining our design choices, and why we think IndexedDB is a better solution for the web than Web SQL Database.

In another article, we compare IndexedDB with Web SQL Database, and note that the former provides much syntactic simplicity over the latter. IndexedDB leaves room for a third-party JavaScript library to straddle the underlying primitives with a BTree API, and we look forward to seeing initiatives like BrowserCouch built on top of IndexedDB. Intrepid web developers can even build a SQL API on top of IndexedDB. We’d particularly welcome an implementation of the Web SQL Database API on top of IndexedDB, since we think that this is technically feasible. Starting with a SQL-based API for use with browser primitives wasn’t the right first step, but certainly there’s room for SQL-based APIs on top of IndexedDB.

I'm not personally swayed by the arguments put forth in the article, but it seems clear that (for the time being) Mozilla has decided that Web SQL Database is dead.

Further interesting comments about this article may be found on Hacker News.