The current standards are a <i>decade</i> old already, HTML5 has been 6 years in the making and will probably be another 4 or 5 years before it reaches a market penetration that makes it an generally-viable design decision rather than what it is now - a device or browser specific option.<p>Work probably won't even <i>start</i> on the HTML6 specification for another decade at least while they wrap up all the formalities for HTML5, and identify where it needs improvement, and slowly discuss and agree on those improvements.  Years after that browsers will start supporting it feature by feature, and years after that enough users will have access to enough features to call it mainstream.<p>That process is <i>very</i> likely to leave us having this same discussion about whether HTML6 will kill Flash in 2030.  Assuming anyone still makes or cares about any of this stuff that far in the future.<p>Where we are now with HTML5 the void between HTML5 and plugins (Flash is just the most significant) is smaller than it's ever been before, but the fallacy of that argument is that Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, Unity, etc are in <i>active development and release cycles</i>.<p>They make significant progress year after year, just like desktop software, operating systems, programming languages etc, and while HTML5 <i>almost</i> catches up <i>right now</i> this is as close as it's going to get at this time.