Metamarkets thinks the next era of web will be about JavaScript:

I. 1991-1999: The HTML Age.

The HTML Age was about documents, true to Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of a “big, virtual documentation system in the sky.” The web was dominated by static, hand-coded files, which web clients crudely formatted (with defaults that offend even the mildest of typographiles). Static documents were served to static clients.

II. 2000-2009: The LAMP Age.

The LAMP Age was about databases. Rather than documents, the dominant web stacks were LAMP or LAMP-like. Whether CGI, PHP, Ruby on Rails, or Django, the dominant pattern was populating an HTML template with database values. Content was dynamic server-side, but still static client-side.

III. 2010-??: The Javascript Age.

The Javascript age is about event streams. Modern web pages are not pages, they are event-driven applications through which information moves. The core content vessel of the web — the document object model — still exists, but not as HTML markup. The DOM is an in-memory, efficiently-encoded data structure generated by Javascript.