Sure the iPad and SXSWi have been grabbing all the headlines lately, but HTML 5 might have an even bigger impact. Okay, maybe an equal impact to the iPad. But, like many I've found myself wondering just what HTML 5 is.

For the most part it is being billed as a "Flash killer" capable of replacing Flash for embedded movies and animations on sites. Because Apple has been loath to support Flash on the iPad and iPhone versions of their Safari browser lots of sites simply wont work. For instance, Hulu. Assuming HTML 5 can do as good a job of support video, what else will it do?

A short list, from Wikipedia:

Ability to use inline SVG and MathML in text/html

• New parsing rules oriented towards flexible parsing and compatibility; not based on SGML
• New elements – article, aside, audio, canvas, command, details, datalist, dialog, embed, figure, footer, header, hgroup, keygen, mark, meter, nav, progress, output, rp, rt, ruby, section, source, time, video
• New types of form controls – dates and times, email, url, search
• New attributes – ping (on a and area), charset (on meta), async (on script)
• Global attributes (that can be applied for every element) – id, tabindex, hidden, data-* (custom data attributes)
• Forms will get support for PUT and DELETE methods too instead of just GET and POST (see Representational State Transfer for use cases)
• Deprecated elements dropped – center, font, frameset, strike

So, I'm excited but also a bit cautious. I have a hard time believing all the anti-Flash rhetoric suggesting that HTML 5 will be the end for Flash, but we'll see...