.
Just for the sake of discussion ... I completely disagree ... :wink:

Some things are meant to stay indefinitely and html code is one of those things!
Again, back to 1991 when I first started playing with html, there was no such thing as javascripting, php, java, js, flashfiles, and other things that came along later. HTML was first and that's undeniable. As a result of being the first type of code to be implemented for web pages, and still talking about the 90s, there were over 250 million web pages/sites Worldwide ... yup, in the 90s already! By the time that the year 2000 came around, now almost 10 years ago, html was as established as it was ever going to get, at that time with an estimated (news documentaries about the internet) 2 BILLION homepages worldwide, at least half of which were viable, professional sites with nothing but pure, free, public information ... information that was not likely to be presented differently (php, xhtml, etc.) for many years to come, if ever ....
Today, even today you can still find sites from as far back as the 90s with all html coding.
And it's exactly because of those hundreds of millions of pages worldwide that html will never actually be replaced.

Netscape tried ... and failed to standardize all web coding. Our sites used to receive in excess of 70% traffic, years ago, from netscape users. Today, we have about 78% of traffic from IE users and 6% from firefox users. The one thing that so many developers/programmers are just refusing to acknowledge, something that's been driving me nuts for quite a few years, is THE FACT that their bread and butter is being paid for by clients who expect traffic to their sites ... and those clients don't give a flying crap how much the developers love firefox. Those paying clients only care about hits by their visitors, and if the vast majority of hits are being generated by IE users, then those sites *MUST* first and foremost conform to those standards ... even if the developers don't like it.

But back to HTML, sorry about that ...
The sheer amount of old as well as new pages and sites simply prohibits any other code to actually replace html, and thus html is here to stay indefinitely. Most of the coding changes that are taking place don't even have a lot to with the "replacement" of html, but rather, are written to easier accommodate different code variables within one and the same file, such as javascript, php, html, and/or xhtml all at once. That's why you're seeing the changes that you're seeing. And as far as different looks on different pages/sites are concerned, 99% of that comes from the fact that a site is either created by a developer who dislikes IE thereby designing sites with tunnelvision, and/or people who design sites without the proper knowledge of how to make things look identical, regardless if IE6/7 or Firefox or Opera are being used, those currently being the 3 most widely used browsers in the world. According to our stats, only 0.4 % of our users are Netscape user anymore. I take great pride in the ability to be able to code darn near anything with html directly, or on the basis of html. And I'm not alone ... there are tens of thousands of dinosaurs like me out there, who make their pages and sites look perfect with all of the browsers, and it's because of people like us and the aforementioned numbers, that html is here to stay ... at least for the next 10 years or so.

Does this limit my abilities online? Absolutely, it certainly does!
But considering the fact that I do professional image design work, professional translations, basic perl/cgi, large scale web development (huge structures), professional desktop publishing, animation projects, advertising projects, site maintenance on a domain with 40.000+ files, computer repair, design, and building ... I simply don't have the time nor motivation to learn anything else ... because the wife, kid, and our dogs would like to have a piece of me as well.

Yeah, CDs are cool, but have you heard ... many artists are beginning to release vinyl again.
Yeah, xhtml is cool, but ....
That's my take on the html issue anyway. :D
.