HTML 4.0 is the latest and perhaps the last standard for HTML and moderately
supported by the major browsers. HTML can be created by a wide range of tools,
from simple plain text editors - you simply type it in - to advanced WYSIWYG
authoring tools.
HTML uses tags such as <H1> and </H1>to structure text into headings, paragraphs, lists, hypertext links etc.
With a wealth of features, HTML 4.0 includes:
Support for style sheets: You can use a style sheet written in the simple CSS language to control colour, font and the layout of your Web pages and is truly the first step to separating data from presentation.
International features: To facilitate a truly international World Wide Web. HTML includes features for rendering the flow of text from right to left, as, for example, in Arabic and Hebrew. The LANG attribute can be used with many tags to help the browsers display text in a way appropriate to the language in question. There are also features for denoting the character encoding and language of a document.
Accessibility features: Some Internet users rely on speech synthesizers or Braille readers when browsing the Web. HTML 4.0 includes features, which makes the Internet more accessible to those who are visually impaired or have other disabilities.
Tables and Forms: There are many features for rendering tables and forms in HTML
Scripting and multimedia: There are also a number of features for inserting scripts into HTML including the OBJECT tag to render with various muti-media elements.
Database integration: Dynamic Data on the fly
The Next Generation of HTML for Web Site Design and Development is XHTML.
In the bigger picture, we focus on the way in which a variety of specifications fit into the overall picture of the efforts of the World Wide Web. Next Generation HTML encompasses Cascading Style Sheets, HTML 4.0, the Document Object Model, Dynamic HTML, the XML family of specifications, and the many specifications based on XML, such as RDF, SMIL, and MathML.
XHTML has arrived.
However, before we look at XHTML, it is perhaps worthwhile if we take a closer
look at: Cascading Style Sheets: Separating data from presentation.