After Steve Jobs delivered his anti-Flash manifesto last week, Microsoft chimed into the Flash-versus-HTML5 debate as well: Redmond likes the standard too and plans to develop future versions of Internet Explore for it. The future of the web is HTML5, Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of Internet Explorer wrote in a blog post.

"Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design."

Is this the final blow for Adobe's Flash? Hachamovitch says not - despite its problems with reliability. "Today, video on the web is predominantly Flash-based. While video may be available in other formats, the ease of accessing video using just a browser on a particular website without using Flash is a challenge for typical consumers."

But now that all of the majors players - Google, Apple and Microsoft - have weighed in on the debate, it may well be that Flash's days will eventually be numbered. With Microsoft having tipped its hand about HTML5, all of all the major browsers, including Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, support or will support HTML5.

Few Worries

End users will not notice the difference when the shift occurs, says Fast Company -  "except that soon your browser may be a bit more stable when playing video, and you may see fewer requests to 'update your Flash plug-in.'"

Ad execs are not worried either - despite the additional cost of developing for two standards until the web harmonizes on HTML5, according to ClickZ.  Razorfish CEO Bob Lord says developers are used to minimizing costs while doing so when building for multiple platforms. "We develop with a mindset where whatever we build is going to be portable to every device."

A Lot to Like

There is a lot to like about HTML5's features, says Google developer advocate Mark Pilgrim, who was speaking at the WWW2010 conference (via PC World) - including the new semantic tags, forms, multimedia, canvas, geolocation and off-line Web applications. HTML5 supports both audio and video, for example, allowing the designer to use a built-in browser control panel or build a customized one from scratch. The built-in multimedia tags are declarative tags, meaning the designer can specify what features, such as autoplay or default controls, to include with a single declaration, PC World notes.

Script, by contrast, is harder to control, Pilgrim said.