HTML Beyond the Web

of the HTML pages you'll create in your lifetime probably will not be web pages.

To understand why, and to see the big picture of where HTML is headed, consider the following features of the latest HTML (XHTML) standard:

• Through style sheets and scripting, HTML gives you precise control over the appearance and functionality of virtually any textual and graphical information.

• All major programming languages, interactive media, and database formats can also be seamlessly integrated with HTML.

• HTML's extended character sets and fonts can be used to communicate in the native script of almost any human language in the world.

• Data security standards make it practical to carry out financial and other sensitive transactions with HTML, and to manage confidential or restricted-access information.

• HTML, with some of them highly reliant on HTML (and XML) as a standard data format.

All this adds up to a very near future in which HTML will, without a doubt, play a central roleit might even be accurate to say the central rolein the display and exchange of almost all information across all computers and computer networks on earth. This sounds important because it is important. However, this hour will make a case that HTML will have an even more important role than that to play. To understand how that can be so, we'll need to take another step back to see an even bigger picture: the changing role of the computer itself in our society.