A brief conversation I jumped into on twitter was being conducted by two people I know who are developers in some form or another. Both, I’m sure, have a vested interest in the web.

One of the most exciting things to happen to the web outside of “web 2.0″ (which was essentially having websites focus on services that are simple and easy to use) is HTML5, which is a new version of the basic technology that drives websites.

HTML is a computer language that programmers can write to have browsers (internet explorer, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, etc.) interpret as what you see on the front end. HTML5 is a series of technologies that empowers that with a lot of awesome new philosophies and theses. We used to have to use Adobe Flash (which is CPU, memory and time intensive) for fancy websites that have graphical overlays and notches, that had loading bars and other horrid things that interrupted user experience. Now, though, we have a very refined approach with HTML5 that “just works”.

It’s a new and emerging technology and the reason for this post above all is that my point when interjecting the twitter conversation was that HTML5 is being adopted very fast by browser makers because developers love it. It’s easy to use, works extraordinarily well but above all, it turns browsers from mere portals to the web into powerful render engines that become more platform-like then anything else. Look at Google’s Chrome browser (my default browser). It’s just a browser, but Google have implemented a HTML5-powered app store into it. It’s easy, it works and it doesn’t ruin my computer – plus being on the web means a lot of the content is in “the cloud”, rather then clogging up my hard drive!