While Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun duke it out with proprietary technologies for implementing multimedia on the Web, HTML 5 has the potential to "eat these vendors' lunches", offering Web experiences based on an industry standard.
In fact, one expressed goal of the new standard is to move the Web away from proprietary technologies such as Flash, Silverlight, and JavaFX.
"It would be a terrible step backward if humanity's major development platform the Web was controlled by a single vendor the way that previous platforms such as Windows have been," says HTML 5 co-editor Ian Hickson, a Google employee.
But whether HTML 5 and its Canvas technology will displace proprietary plug-ins "really depends on what developers do," says Firefox technical lead Vlad Vukicevic.
It also depends on Microsoft, the only company involved in the HTML 5 effort that is both a browser developer and an RIA tool developer.
"That's a big elephant in the room for them because you can imagine the Silverlight team whose whole existence is to add this functionality in. But if Internet Explorer puts it already in there, why do we have Silverlight?" asks Mozilla's Dion Almaer.
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