," said Microsoft's Steve Ballmer at Gartner Symposium last week. He's not alone. Google CEO Eric Schmidt calls it "the next step in browsers," while Apple's Steve Jobs says, bluntly, that it "will win" against browser plug-ins like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. HTML5, according to people who would know, is the inevitable future of the Internet—we're told it will make our favorite web pages richer, faster or just vaguelyBut what is it, exactly?

First, let's crash through some of the basics. Hypertext markup language (HTML) is the code behind every website on the Internet. It is, as the name suggests, a language: a series of words and values, each assigned specific meanings and tasks and tied together with specific syntax. But it's a complementary language, in which is wrapped the content we care about, such as words, images and video. It's the invisible language that liaises between raw information and our web browsers, giving it all shape and form.

As such, to a layperson, this language looks like a nonsensical, bracket-filled wall of computer gibberish. (For a taste, try right-clicking on this article and selecting "View Source.") But Web browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera are able to read this language, interpret its instructions and render it all together as intricate, complex web pages.

In order for this process to work, its language must be well-defined and standardized. This responsibility falls to an organization called the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), working in concert with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). With the help of browser makers and developers, these guys basically write and then perpetually rewrite the book on HTML. The standards and specifications they create aren't binding, but they're the closest thing developers and software companies have to HTML law.

The last major revision to the HTML specification (4.0) came in 1998, and while it hasn't changed much, Web developers and browser makers have consistently pushed its boundaries to the breaking point, informally agreeing on supplemental standards, many of which eventually find their way into the WHATWG's official tomes. Likewise, while HTML5 has been in active development since 2004 and won't be fully codified for years, significant parts of it are in use today. (That's one of the reasons that HTML5 is often misunderstood: Its adoption is ongoing and slow, a mixture of prescriptive and descriptive pieces.)

The long, tortuous, behind-the-scenes process of building a Web language specification might not be terribly exciting, but its consequences for websites emphatically are. The first boon comes in the form of housekeeping. "HTML5 replaces the fragile ecosystem of JavaScript, HTML, plug-ins and undocumented de facto standards with a rigorously specified standard," says Bruce Lawson, Web evangelist for Opera Software and author of "Introducing HTML5." Many features that users once yearned for, such as Web video and complex Web apps, have been provided to us as a patchwork of jury-rigged plug-ins and coding tricks. HTML5 consolidates some of these tools, and eliminates the need for others.

That said, the real meat of the HTML5 spec is its new application programming interfaces (APIs), each promising new goodies to Web users and developers alike. Just as earlier versions of HTML allowed images to be embedded in websites, HTML5 includes a system for embedding videos, without the need for slow, buggy plug-ins like Adobe Flash. There has beensome infighting about the specifics of how HTML5 video should work, but that didn't stop Steve Jobs from throwing his full weight behind it, going so far as to proclaim in a public posting that Flash is "no longer necessary." Indeed, the iPad became one of the first devices to exclusively use HTML5 to play embedded Web videos, and doesn't seem to suffer much for it.

HTML5 also brings with it a hefty collection of tools that make editing text, be it in a complex document or a blog comment section, easier and richer. Images and page elements can be dragged and dropped, like icons on a desktop. Web developers can add a whiteboard-style drawing area with just a line or two of code. Tools like these make Web developers' lives easier, and their complex websites cleaner and more consistent.

HTML5 also lets sites such as Gmail store data offline, on your hard drive, so they can continue functioning without an Internet connection. On location-aware devices, HTML5 sites can also access GPS information, which is particularly useful in mobile browsers. The standard also introduces a standardized system for bookmarks, which can be passed between browsers. With these new powers come security concerns, but the specification is adamant about consent: Users are to be asked before browsers can request location info or the use of hard-drive space.

Standing alone, many of these features could be dismissed as merely neat. Together they amount to something much more seductive. "HTML5 makes it much easier to make robust applications that are delivered over the Web rather than installed on desktop machines," Ford says.

The dream of HTML5, if a Web language specification can be said to have dreams, is that one day, Web apps like Gmail and Google Docs will act and feel as snappy and rich as their traditional software counterparts, Outlook and Office.

And it's a dream that is slowly but surely coming true. Applications of all types are moving away from our desktops and into the cloud, inexorably pulled by the Googles, Microsofts and Facebooks of the world, who hope, for better or worse, to extend their influence deeper into the center of our computing lives. Futurists and prognosticators have talked about this shift for years, and HTML5 might finally make it happen.

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