A W3C Recommendation indicates that consensus has been reached among the Consortium Members that a specification is appropriate for widespread use. HTML 4.0 is W3C's recommendation for the latest version of HTML, following on from earlier work on HTML 3.2 and HTML 2.0 . To facilate a truly international Web, HTML includes features for rendering text written right to left, as, for example, in Arabic and Hebrew. The LANG attribute can be used with many tags to help the browser to display text in a way appropriate to the language in question. There are also features for specifying the character encoding and language of a document designated by a hypertext link.
Some users rely on speech synthesizers or Braille readers when browsing the Web.
HTML 4 includes features which makes the Web more accessible to those who are visually impaired or have other disabilities. You specify which of these variants you are using by inserting a line at the beginning of the document. For example, the HTML for this document starts with a line which says that is it using HTML 4.0 Transitional. Thus, if you want to validate the document, the tool used knows which variant you are using. Transitional - Most people writing Web pages for the general public to access will want to use this flavor of HTML 4.0.