The HTML 5 standard is looking promising. Currently Crome and Opera  has very good support, Firefox has some support for HTML5, Firefox 4 will have complete support. Most of the browsers will be fully supporting it in the next 6-12 months.

HTML 5 will offer many features which today requires additional plugins like Flash.

Here are some of the key features:

  • Direct support for video. HTML 5 has tags for running videos within the browser without the need for Flash. this will improve video integration and performance.  This requires your browser to support various codecs as well such as H.264  You can test if your browser already supports this: http://www.youtube.com/html5
  • 2D drawings, so you can ask your brower to draw an image, and it will do it. Its vector graphics instead of raster graphics which is gif,jpegs, pngs, etc. Hence the files are smaller in size.
  • Offline web-application support, so you can run web applications even if you are offline.
  • Drag and drop support. you can drag files from your computer and attach to your gmail. You can try this if you have crome installed.

Aviary has launched an HTML 5 based photo editor, have a look.

If you are more interested, check the video on Introduction to HTML 5