For the last 5 or 6 years, there has been a growing hype around the languages used to build websites and web applications. As you surely know, the reason was mainly related to the proliferation of mobile devices of all types: tablets, phones, IoT devices, and so on.
Parallel to this, back in 2008, a new effort for standardization emerged at the W3C (http://www.w3.org, the entity that takes care of most of the Internet language's specs) in order to update these languages of the Web and make them more suitable for this decade's needs. Announcements like the elimination of Flash components (or Silverlight, for that matter) on platforms such as MacOS or iOS only fostered these attempts.
For the first time in many years, a bunch of companies invested in the creation of this new Open Web that would be capable of holding any kind of content in a flexible, adaptable, easy-to-use, and responsive way.
All these efforts came to an end in 2015, with the final recommendation of HTML5...