Macromedia is in the business to make money. So is microsoft. You can bet that if microsoft had been the company that developed HTML, we'd be paying $99 for our license to use notepad to make web pages.
(SGML, the basis for HTML, incidently, grew out of IBM's need for a standard documentation format in the 60s. Berners-Lee just added on a few concepts, like the link and the anchor, and the result was the web page).
Talk of next-generation formats for internet documents frightens me. Why? We have Adobe, with .PDF. Adobe would love to make the case that PDF is a successor to HTML, since it offers incredible control over layout and offers features like linking... except that PDF is computationally expensive to display, it's a binary format, and it's semiproprietary.
Macromedia has flash. Same as PDF, only entirely proprietary and VERY difficult to manipulate (don't think I can do anything but view Flash).
... and then of course there are the billion different XML specs. The problem here is that everyone wants to write a proprietary but essential data type that would force everyone into THEIR standard, which they would control.
Net effect: Nothing happens, and we're as stuck with HTML as with ASCII.
The other sad thing that I see is that VERY little progress has been made in developing internet standards since the corporate world became interested in the concepts related to internet standards. Sure, we get standards (CSS is a good one), but considering how basic some of this stuff is, it needs to be RESOLVED. "Letting the market take care of it" didn't work. How many different IM clients are out there? How many streaming multimedia packages?
All the great, important decisions that make up the internet were made by engineers, back when corporations didn't have "internet strategies".
Sigh. Sometimes it's just frustrating to realize the sheer idiocy of what's involved in making all this stuff work.
