Originally Posted by Bruce Lawson, SitePoint.com

To some, it’s an outrageous attempt by browser manufacturers to foist what they want onto developers. In SitePoint’s HTML 5: Now or Never? article, Tommy Olsson described it as “an abomination ... it mocks everything I consider important on the Web.” Others see it as the way forward for developing powerful multimedia web apps on an open architecture, without Flash or Silverlight or similar proprietary technologies. Doug Schepers, the W3C’s Team Contact for the SVG and Web Apps Working Groups says, “HTML 5 is not a technical achievement, it’s a social movement.”

The reason that opinion is so divided is that HTML 5 is more than just a markup syntax for documents, like HTML 4 is. One clue is in the working group’s original name, before it was brought into the W3C camp: Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. The original goal for HTML 5 was to make it easier to develop Web applications. There’s evidence of this in the rash of new JavaScript APIs and support for offline development, some of which are already available in a browser near you.