I see various frameworks being launched that promise Rich Ui and better User experience as they call it. Silverlight, Flash, Yahoo's new framework etc etc.
Does this mean that over a period of time these frameworks will replace the existing HTML, JAVASCRIPT CSS based web applications?
Wouldn't it be same as opening an application inside a browser window?
i don't think they'll replace .HTML just like I don't think anything has replaced .TXT. I am fairly sure these new technologies will, over time, enjoy wider adoption and use. And probably someone will come up with a major break-thru and we'll all flock to use that new cool app-building client-delivery tech.
But I would wager whatever that new thing is it still comes to the browser embedded in an html page
Not anytime soon. There are many complentary technologies as you mentioned in your tags.
HTML if anything will have evolutionary changes rather than revolutionary changes.
No, they won't.
All new technologies promise to be The Next Everything That Solves All Your Life's Problems And Brews Your Coffee, but few do (I haven't found anything that would do both simultaneously :/ ).
Silverlight and Flash suffer from the Magic Window syndrome - they're just a box of multimedia inside your browser that's separated from everything else. Sure, they can call JavaScript to the outside world, but that's when they become addicted to JavaScript and (X)HTML. "Yahoo's new framework" use JavaScript, CSS and HTML, so that's out the window already.
What we will se (and do see already) are various frameworks and toolkits and stuff that help you with various tedious tasks. But, if they work in the browser, they all will use (X)HTML, CSS and JavaScript at some point of their stack.
HTML has been increasingly becoming more like XML than anything else. I'd probably expect to see namespaces to possibly get introduced into a future revision/draft of HTML and closer/more complex CSS and JavaScript usage.
HTML won't be replaced as a standard any time soon. It's too wide spread a technology, and the amount of re-education required among people working with webapps and websites to switch technology completely would be massive and very costly.
HTML will however, like any other technology, evolve. Look at HTML today compared to 10 years ago, it's the same language in the basics but the way we use it, and add-on technologies have changed it quite a lot. Even a high tech, premium site made 10 years ago will look feeble with todays standards.
So, while HTML will like stay "the same" (i.e. follow the natural evolution of a standard), the technology behind the site (php, .NET, JAVA etc.) will probably be more likely to change.
HTML5. I estimate 5 years for adoption.
Edit: My answer is rather curt, but seriously, HTML is just a markup language (not programming!). And one that we have lots of experience with. It provides a simple framework for documents.
Edit2: Oh, and maybe XUL... if Mozilla's market share goes up.
Will insert-current-technology-here be replaced by any new technology?
Yes.
Ufortunately, not in the near future. At best they will only really go along the lines of Flash/Java Applets/Siverlight, and just be (mostly) black boxes embedded in html.
Not that I have anything against html per se, I make most of my living doing web sites and related programming, having wrangled with html (+css + js +asp/php/cgi/aspnet/jsp...) since netscape was big, along with the associated browser compatibility issues.
Web developers have been fighting tooth and nail with the limitations of html for years now, and the ever increasing expectations of clients of a more desktop like experience doesn't make it any easier.
Sure we have some fancier tachniques like ajax to play with, and browsers' js engines are getting better, but html still shows the limitations of its roots as relatively static publishing medium. But it is the dominant medium, and wont go away any time soon.
HTML 5 promises to make some improvements, but has been at the centre of a nerd war for way too long, at least a few years before we see any significant changes there.
Yes. In a very long time. Html facilitates presentation, but it has its drawbacks, and it only works for the medium it is used on (computer screens). The future will hold completely different ways of interaction, and Html won't be anywhere to be seen.
You caould have asked 40 years ago, will a car ever not have 4 wheels, a steering wheel and an internal combustion engine? People may have laughed, but now we have very different cars round the corner.
The problem here is that HTML is very very good for describing documents, which is what it was designed for, and not particularly good for helping lay out complicated interfaces/web applications, which is what a lot of people seem to want to do. This leads to a holy mess of acronyms and buzzwords sitting atop each other, all contributing towards some flaky pseudo-widget system; fundamentally, people keep reinventing windowing systems in the browser.
At some point, I think, it's got to give - if people want really rich Internet applications, then we're going to have to come up with something else. Applet-like embedded plugins such as the now-ubiquitous Flash, and the new kids on the block, like Silverlight, go some way towards trying to provide that, but they're far from perfect, either, so we bitch and go back to hacking up unholy abominations atop HTML pages.
HTML might be old, but it's perfectly suited to the original purpose of the web. Ultimately, if people want the web to be something different, then the whole stack has to reflect that change.
I for one believe that HTML/JS/CSS is the future of the web. With the advent of HTML5 and the new features it brings to the spec, for instance >canvas<, >audio<, >video<, there really becomes no need for separate plugins in the browser like flash and silverlight. Of course, it will take a good many years for this great shift in paradigm to take place... but one can only hope.
HTML will be completely replaced around the time that no computer is running COBOL code anywhere. :-)
Eventually HTML will be considered the Assembly of the web. We all know Ruby or Python is just flipping ones and zeroes, but we don't have to think of it that way. However, computers are still flipping ones and zeroes.
We may get to the point where we no longer have to think in terms of divs and text, but it will probably be there for a very long time. :)
Nothing can replace the idea of HTML, though its various forms may eventually expire. The reason for this is simple: investment. How many programmers have invested thousands of hours into the parsing and rendering of HTML? I have no idea! HTML has been around for a very long time now, for a web standard/technology, and has almost no hope of being replaced. The only possible replacement is a binary replacement, thanks to the decreased size such a format would have. But that would likely be proprietary or something, and if so it too would fail to supplant HTML.
HTML will outlive COBOL and Ada by one hundred years minimum.