Originally Posted by
TheBachellor
Honestly some of you are so clueless about the internet it's scary.
First off... HTML is a web language that's become the standard for dispalying web pages online. Pretty much every page that you navigate to on the internet is made from the ground up from HTML.
The current HTML standard is 4.0. HTML 5 is getting attention because it's a revision to the standard which includes video support. This is important because HTML is a universal language, meaning that it is not owned by one company. Currently all the technologies that enable video (Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, etc), are proprietary (owned by other companies).
This revision is supposed to limit the need for you to have to download proprietary plug-ins just to enable video in your browsers.
The downside to this is that when it becomes the standard, HTML 5.0 will be very young, and lacking in the features department compared to the aforementioned plug ins. That, and those technologies are useful for things other than video (i.e : games).
HTML 5 will be getting a big push because once it's released, I believe YouTube will be switching over to it (from flash). However, I don't see wide adoption in the near future, if ever. People don't even comply to HTML rules now.... and you can learn the language in like a couple of hours
.