As I understand the reason they switched to the year based naming is because they plan to do yearly standards now, switching to a release date based model rather than a feature based model. C++ has kind of switched to this model too, where features that are ready to go for the release date are included, and ones that aren&#x27;t quite baked enough will not hold up the release, to help avoid an ES6 type situation where the committee works for years and years without releasing an update.<p>So it&#x27;s not that standards become out of date, especially as in both Javascript and C++&#x27;s case, the standards are generally additive.  They just add stuff so your old software should continue to work and will not become &quot;out of date&quot;.<p>Anyway, that&#x27;s the reasoning I&#x27;ve been given behind the change and it makes sense to me. Hopefully that answers the question for you as well.