Recently, many of my friends have been asking me for an explanation of HTML5, mainly what it is/does. To be honest it came as quite a surprise to me how many people were in the dark, so I thought I’d throw up a quick post, nothing in depth – just enough so that you can show off to your Gran!

In case you don’t already know HTML is a language used for the foundation for a web page, governing class and in the old days positioning of content. Currently still in development – apart from the standard incremental updates – HTML5′s main aim is to try and reduce the need for media-based plug-ins such as Flash or Silverlight by building their functionality in to the language.

Native video playback is one of the main things people are talking about, replacing the need for Flash on sites such as YouTube. In fact, if you sign up for the beta you can already try it assuming you have a compatible browser. Go check it out, it certainly works well in my opinion, although it can’t support annotations… I shouldn’t think that’ll make you too unhappy.

So what’s the point? Being able to embed videos directly not only makes it easier for web developers it also makes it easier on your computer. Flash in particular uses an obscene amount of processing power for what it does, using up battery and slowing your computer down. However in my opinion the most exciting prospect is the support for mobile devices, we all know that the iPhone and others don’t support Flash. HTML5 should hopefully make web browsing on those devices much better, there’s nothing more annoying than seeing that flash plug-in not installed warning.

So will HTML5 replace Flash? Extremely unlikely, given time it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it took over video but you’ve got to remember that Flash does much more than that – from games to those annoying adverts. Even then, if you look at how long it’s taken to try and get rid of hideously out of date browsers such as IE6, you wonder how long it’ll take before a significant amount of people are using browsers which support HTML5 (currently only partially supported by the latest releases of most browsers, although a notable exception is IE8…). It is however a huge step forward for the internet in general.

What are your thoughts about HTML5? Already trying out the beta? Let us know in the comments below.