HTML5 has been around for a while now, and a lot of people in my industry understand how important it and related standards technologies such as CSS3 are for the future of the Web. However, conveying that in an eye-catching manner to the typical “lay person” has been pretty much up for grabs. Until now.

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), which is the main standards body in charge of drafting specifications for Web technologies, today released a new HTML5 logo that promotes the fresh power of the latest “open Web” technologies. I think it looks fantastic. What’s interesting is there’s not just a single logo, but a set of icons accompanying it that reference specific aspects of the HTML5 spec or related specs (CSS3, SVG, etc.). You can create a badge showing off which of those various features are in use on your site.

It’ll be interesting to see how quickly this new branding effort takes off. My guess is you’ll see it used a lot by Web designers quickly, followed by more and more apps, and eventually a host of sites wanting to align themselves with the buzz surrounding HTML5. Anything that boosts awareness of what HTML5 is all about is fine by me!

TED just announced the addition of HTML5 support to their video-rich site for mobile devices, thus allowing iPhone, iPad, etc. that don’t support Flash to view and playback their media. While I applaud their move and many other companies that are introducing new HTML5 versions of their media players, I have to take exception to the approach that only mobile devices are targeted for these versions.

Let’s face facts here: Flash is not a real Web technology. It’s not an open language, like HTML or CSS. You can’t easily develop your own Flash renderer or generator. You can’t help contribute to the future of Flash. Flash is owned by Adobe. It’s a proprietary runtime, embedded onto a Web page through the use of browser plugin support which originally was intended to serve as a stopgap measure back in the days when Web technology was primitive.

These days, the standards-based Web is becoming extremely sophisticated. HTML5 is a major leap forward and one that heralds a future where open technology can handle all the media-rich, interactive applications one can dream of. Flash, while still superior from a capability side at this present moment, truly and literally will not be necessary for 90% of typical use cases in the near future. If I were Adobe, I’d be shaking in my shoes right now.

Here’s what I don’t understand: Flash as an animation software package is very attractive. Why doesn’t Adobe just take what they have and add support for rendering out to Canvas or SVG for vector art and HTML5/CSS for other elements? It’s true they’ve invested so much in the proprietary runtime that is Flash, but surely they must realize their days as the solution for multimedia on the Web are numbered.

I am proud to state that I am not a Flash developer. I build standards-based sites that work in any browser on any platform. Soon, I will be building HTML5 & CSS3 Web sites that do some pretty cool things. I can hardly wait.