Well, actually, the language has reached middle age in standard Version 4.01 and is not expected to change again. Rather, HTML is being subsumed and modularized as part of Extensible Markup Language (XML). Its new name is XHTML, Extensible Hypertext Markup Language.

The emergence of XHTML is just another chapter in the often tumultuous history of HTML and the World Wide Web, where confusion for authors is the norm, not the exception. At the worst point, the elders of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) responsible for accepted and acceptable uses of the language -- i.e., standards -- lost control of the language in the browser "wars" between Netscape Communications and Microsoft. The abortive HTML+ standard never got off the ground, and HTML 3.0 became so bogged down in debate that the W3C simply shelved the entire draft standard. HTML 3.0 never happened, despite what some opportunistic marketers claimed in their literature. Instead, by late 1996, the browser manufacturers convinced the W3C to release HTML standard Version 3.2, which for all intents and purposes simply standardized most of the leading browser's (Netscape's) HTML extensions.

Fortunately for those of us who appreciate and strongly support standards, the W3C took back its primacy role with HTML 4.0, which stands today as HTML Version 4.01, released in December 1999. The standard is clearer and cleaner than any previous ones, establishes solid implementation models for consistency across browsers and platforms, provides strong supports and incentives for the companion Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard for HTML-based displays, and makes provisions for alternative (non-visual) user-agents, as well as for more universal language supports.

Cleaner and clearer aside, the W3C realized that HTML could never keep up with the demands of the web community for more ways to distribute, process, and display documents. HTML only offers a limited set of document creation primitives and is hopelessly incapable of handling non-traditional content like chemical formulae, musical notation, or mathematical expressions. Nor can it well support alternative display media, such as handheld computers or intelligent cellular phones, for instance.

To address these demands, the W3C developed the Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard. XML provides the way to create new, standards-based markup languages that don't take an act of the W3C to implement. XML-compliant languages deliver information that can be parsed, processed, displayed, sliced, and diced by the many different communication technologies that have emerged since the Web sparked the digital communication revolution a decade ago. XHTML is HTML reformulated to adhere to the XML standard. It is the foundation language for the future of the Web.