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Thursday, November 30, 2006

Is HTML Dead?

Over the past few years, the use of HTML, has declined rapidly. In fact, I have seen more and more web sites and web developers moving far away from HTML than ever before.



New authoring languages, most especially CSS and XML, for web page creation have really become the way to go in the 'industry.' There's no questions that when CSS emerged during the late 1990's, it quickly grew in popularity because it allowed web designers and developers spend less time on coding each and every piece of content, and instead replace it with a tag that would do all the formatting based on the settings in one CSS file.


Mixing CSS with HTML back then made sense and it worked, for the most part. Ask back-end engineers what they thought of CSS when it first surfaced and caused headaches because it was so new and still somewhat clunky.

Nowadays, CSS has actually merged with many HTML elements to create tags that are more dynamic and friendly to various browsers and operating systems. The growth of OpenSource software and other alternatives to the two big browsers - Internet Explorer and Firefox - has spurred further modifications to web page coding, and will continue to.

Actually, if you think about it, has CSS and XML really decreased the amount of coding work that developers have to do? That's definitely debatable, especially where I see pages coded in new-generation CSS, if you will, in the use of the much loved
tags. While the 'DIV' tag is officially certified HTML 4.1, it has retired many other traditional HTML tags like HR, B, BR, P, and so on.

All in all, HTML is somewhat still relevant, but mostly for the very beginning and end of web pages and web documents.

Moreover, the introduction of automated software for web authoring and the number of large web sites offering online applications to build web pages (without ever writing a piece of code) means that an entire new generation of web authors (whether they are professionals or just ordinary web users) may never know how to code a simple web page using HTML.

Nevertheless, the fundamentals of HTML remain relevant, even as they have metamorphosed into a variety of cross-platform (including Linux) authoring languages over the years.

All things considered, HTML will continue to be relevant, but it will also continue to diminish in significance as more dynamic and cost-effective authoring languages eventually morph HTML into oblivion.

For example, the rapid rise in consumer use of hand-held devices to access email and web will keep rising at phenomenal percentages. This alone has presented multiple challenges to developers, engineers and designers when considering how a web page will be constructed, parsed, delivered and viewed on the web, on hand-helds, mobile phones and who knows what next. Your eye glasses or sun glasses? Trust me, someone is working on it somewhere. A quick search on Google backs up that statement.

In the end, web authoring for all the various platforms, operating systems and browsers is something that web developers, authors and designers will always have to grapple with (not to mention the stress that comes down from the business and marketing folks who don't always understand how freaking difficult it is to code and test and fix and retest and on and on).

So, the discussion is: Is HTML Dead? If yes, explain. If no, still explain ;-)
Please use the comments button below to publish your opinion on these important issues.

Note: We are currently working on putting up a bulletin board to offer these questions to more professionals in the web development and design community, as well as ordinary web users who build or plan to build web sites.


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