What is in HTML 4.0?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has already released a working draft for HTML 4.0 specifications. Some of the areas in which you can expect improvements and new features include :

Interoperability - all manner of devices should be able to use information on the Web, from PCs with graphics displays of varying resolution and color depths, to cellular telephones and hand held devices, devices for speech for output and for input and so on.

Internationalization - multi-language support. (HTML to be based on 16-bit Unicode character set and not 8-bit ASCII and so support for international languages is enhanced)

Accessibility - for users who are visually handicapped. Some of the features in this direction :

Encourage the use of style sheets rather than tables to achieve layout effects.
Make it easy to provided textual and aural descriptions for visual resources.
Provide active labels for form fields
Provide labelled hierarchical groupings for form fields.
Provide the ability to associate a longer text description of an HTML element.

Compound documents - introduction of new tags and enhancement of the existing ones to support a wide variety of multi-media content and other objects in the Web.

Style sheets - simple ways to specify layout and color of documents.

Scripting - making HTML smarter

Printing - enabling users to print intelligently from the Web
Currently printing a collection of documents from the Web - for example a book of chapters with contents and index - is painful today. This is an unsatisfactory situation. To remedy matters standard HTML features are proposed for linking to the index, contents and other related documents to be used for printing purposes. You will be also able to specify print versions of the document.

Information about documents - better searching and enhanced META tag.

Tables - better and flexible tables. Authors get greater control and browsers will be able to display the table data more quickly, as it arrives. Column widths can be specified, and rows and columns can be grouped.

Mathematical Expressions - for education, research and business

If you want to read the entire working draft for HTML 4.0,
go here ..