Why HTML 5 should be on your CV

Well, Apple's iPad was something of a letdown, wasn't it? The most anticipated product since the iPhone launched onto the global stage not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with what can only be described as an embarrassed shuffle.

You could tell that things were starting to go awry even as Steve Jobs sat down in the comfy chair onstage to carry out the demo. He was scrolling happily through several web pages, blissfully ignoring the fact that the first one he went to - the New York Times - simply didn't work as it was intended. Why? Because apparently, just like its smaller brother, the iPad doesn't support Adobe Flash.



Tim Anderson wrote recently about the need to develop for the mobile Internet. Mobile search and location-based services will drive the mobile web. Mobile advertising has been growing slower than expected -- recently, research firm EMarketer anticipated a $1.1 billion spend by 2012. The financial downturn has slowed developments, but the potential for mobile Internet revenues is staring us in the face, nevertheless.

This is why Jobs' demo last Wednesday is so significant. The iPad is flawed in many respects. It has no camera. There are no standard ports on the thing. It costs more than many net books, and yet its operating system is locked down. But one of the biggest flaws is that without Flash, many of the sites that we would like to visit are not available.

Such is Adobe's chagrin that its platform evangelist Lee Brimelow published a list of websites including Google Finance, Disney, CNN, popular American media streaming site Hulu, and Facebook application Farmville. None of them were without Flash, meaning that none of them will work on the iPad.

Apple's decision to eschew Flash on the iPhone was irritating enough for Adobe, but to do it on a tablet device that Apple hopes will replace the laptop for many consumers sitting on the couch in the evenings is no less than a declaration of war. Adobe needs to promote itself in new markets like this one, where everything is at stake, and Apple is making it very difficult.

Adobe definitely has cause to worry. Apple's share of the mobile market is only 2.7%, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. On the other hand, it sold 99.4% of all mobile applications last year. People buying Apple's mobile devices use them in ways that users of other mobile platforms do not, and Adobe will be well aware of this, as will Microsoft, which offers the competing Silverlight technology.

And looming on the horizon is a potential game changer: HTML 5. This as-yet unratified technology is nevertheless being supported in its unratified perform in many browsers. It is vastly more functional than HTML 4. Web developers can display video using it, without having to resort to Flash. They can produce HTML-only pages that enable you to drag and drop anything, and edit any content. This is why Google Wave, the search engine giant's revolutionary new online messaging system, was built in HTML 5. It looks and feels like a desktop application.

HTML 5 cannot claim to do as much as Flash can, but it may do enough. Apple, which itself likes to dominate all aspects of its business, doesn't like it when other companies like Adobe dominate a single part of the online experience. What Jobs may have been imagining when he scrawled through that broken site last week was a world in which it used HTML 5 -- and in which Adobe was increasingly irrelevant.

What does that mean for IT professionals and web developers today? It means that understanding HTML 5 as it develops, and honing your skills in this exciting new technology, might not be a bad bet. As this new decade rolls on, you will find it looking more and more attractive on your CV.