The Future of HTML

The problem with today is ... it's steadily becoming tomorrow.

The problem with HTML, as far as me teaching it to you, is it's rapidly becoming something else. The HTML of the future is going to be different.

Having said that, and having had mentioned it earlier in this tutorial, HTML is slowly evolving into a much richer and usable format for displaying web pages. The new specification by the W3C is for ... XHTML. Actually it's XML (a very strict language) with HTML stuck inside it. It's an extension in many ways of HTML and will be the future of writing web pages. To teach you XHTML within this tutor, and have it work for you today, is actually not the best way to go.

The Internet, although changing every second we speak, changes very slowly, when it comes to the language it speaks ... HTML. XHTML will be taking over, let there be no doubt about it. HTML is the King today and will be for some time to come. Years for sure.

Backwards compatibility issues with HTML, are probably going to fall by the wayside with XHTML. Once incorporated into the newest versions of the browsers, HTML will slowly fade away to XHTML.

But here lies the problem facing the transition. There are a lot of people on the Internet. Many are of the type that can turn the computer on and get email, see a site or two, but not much else. These people are not going to have the latest browsers on their computers. I know someone who, although IE 6.0 has been out for a while, is still using IE 4.3 (I believe) and probably won't update it until someone comes along and offers to do it for him. It wasn't too long ago that I knew someone running Netscape 2.3 when the newest was 5.0 or maybe 5.1. XHTML won't work on that older browser. So ... how many people are using older browsers? So you can see that it will be a long transition between the WWW as it is today, and what it is slowly evolving into.

So, the scope of this tutorial, in this specific edition, is to bring you up to date and fluent with HTML as it is today. I have presented HTML in a way that will smooth the path for you into XHTML. Most of what you have learned will apply to XHTML with the exception of a few tags here and there that will be replaced. Notice on the Code Chart that some code is marked as deprecated ... that code will not follow through into XHTML. I've included it simply because you may see it somewhere and want to know what it is.

Quite frankly, you are in a very good position right now. I have presented this HTML tutorial to you in a way that ... well, it is HTML, but it's got the properties and "delivery" of XML or XHTML. When it comes time to write only in XHTML, you are going to be ready. Half the battle will be over because you learned HTML (which is very forgiving of improper formatting) the way it was meant to be learned, and the way that XHTML requires it to be. That way is with proper formatting, order to your code, and everything in lowercase.