"Modern HTML rendering engines and emerging standards make it possible to create a new class of rich experiences that could previously be achieved only with native development toolkits—but developers need better Web development frameworks and authoring tools in order to take advantage of the possibilities. Three new open-source software projects developed at Motorola Mobility hope to address the problem.

"Mozilla has teamed up with Web design studio Little Workshop to develop a Web-based multiplayer adventure game called BrowserQuest. The game is built with standards-based Web technologies and is designed to be played within a Web browser.

"According to Microsoft's corporate vice president in charge of IE, Dean Hachamovitch said, the IE10 platform preview means that developers can start working with several "site-ready" HTML5 technologies. Like so many others, Microsoft uses HTML5 as an umbrella term that applies not-only to the still gestating HTML5 standard but also other standards such as JavaScript and CSS.

"This new plug-in, known as the HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in, is available for download here at no cost. It extends the functionality of the earlier plug-in for Firefox, and enables web pages that that offer video in the H.264 format using standard W3C HTML5 to work in Firefox on Windows.

"Google showed off the app at the WebGL Camp. WebGL is a cross-platform low-level 3D graphics API that is designed to bring plugin-free 3D to the web. It uses the HTML5 Canvas element and does not require Flash, Java or other graphical plugins to run. If you visit bodybrowser.googlelabs.com in a supported web browser, you'll get a three-dimensional layered model of the human anatomy that you can zoom in on, rotate and search.

Regardless of the poor flash video performance on Android, it's still better to have compatibility than nothing at all. So how about them Apples?

In keeping with Google's enthusiasm for the emerging HTML5 standard, many upcoming features of the company's Gmail Web-based e-mail service will be rendered in HTML5, said Adam de Boor, a staff software engineer working on the service.ce.

"We have things that we can do much more efficiently in HTML5," said De Boor, speaking Thursday at the Usenix WebApps '10 in Boston.

"HTML5 is exciting to me insofar as to how many browser makers are adopting it," he said, adding, "I have high hopes for IE9."

Microsoft came under fire from some of its rivals on Wednesday for its decision not to offer Internet Explorer 9 -- and hence support for the upcoming HTML 5 standard -- to users of its older Windows XP operating system.

"A trio of Google engineers have ported id Software's gib-filled first-person shooter Quake II to browsers — you know, for kicks — as a way to show just what HTML5-compatible web browsers are capable of. According to the developers, 'We started with the existing Jake2 Java port of the Quake II engine, then used the Google Web Toolkit (along with WebGL, WebSockets, and a lot of refactoring) to cross-compile it into JavaScript.' More details are available on one developer's blog, and installation instructions have been posted as well."