Apple's company-wide focus on marketing is potent; in the spirit of full disclosure I'll admit I'm on the waiting list for the iPhone 4. But their propaganda machine can also churn out some pretty absurd messaging, like their campaign against Flash. HTML5 "lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions". Really? So, a multimedia platform with full market penetration has been supplanted by a markup language in draft status? Interesting. First, let's just accept that for brevity and simplicity, Jobs cheats by summarizing advancements in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as simply "HTML5". Then lets pretend that this parallel progress in web standards could really duplicate all the features of Flash:

• richly interactive online interfaces
• advanced graphics manipulation for apps and games (way beyond PacMan, which wowed the internet)
• a software development environment that integrates seamlessly with frame-based animation
• direct machine access that bridges the gulf between the desktop and internet, allowing things that should be simple (like uploading multiple images to a photography site at once) to actually be simple
• boundless typography without side effects

Let's pretend that somebody could build an HTML5 site that, for instance, allowed people to create and remix multi-track music recordings with all the bells and whistles (literally: there are tons of pedal effects on that mama). Great! Let's have at it! HTML5 is here! Apple kindly provides a demonstration site. This is what Apple's demonstration of the open internet looks like via my open-source, up-to-date, HTML5-adopting browser:

Open standards, eh?  Okay, fine, boot up Safari.  As for their demonstrations, let's just say that no Flash developer worth their salt would be impressed by the rich interactivity on display. It's nice but…hell, I doubt that a Flash developer time-shifted from the year 2000 would be impressed by the rich interactivity on display.

I guess "HTML5 is here" really depends on what your definition of "here" is. The HTML5 spec will, once it is completed, get adopted as a standard. Once the specification is adopted, many web browsers will implement much or all of its feature set – most browsers have adopted some of the spec already. "HTML5" – by which Jobs means wide acceptance of the HTML5 and CSS3 standards coupled with dynamic behavior scripted via JavaScript – is indeed coming. Meanwhile, most of the people on the internet will continue to use Internet Explorer, likely to adopt only a subset or a modified form of the standard. In truth, we won't be able to rely on HTML5 for delivering advanced rich interfaces in the real, cross-browser world, for years. So, for the time being, as pragmatic people working on the actual internet, we still sometimes have to rely on Flash. And then we cannot view or use our sites and features via our "revolutionary" phones, because of marketing. Speaking of marketing, ever wonder who Apple hired to promote the original iPhone launch? It was TBMW. Here is what their website looks like on the iPhone they helped promote:

The TBMW portfolio site recently got promoted: it is now invisible to the iPad and iPhone 4 as well. That's progress, folks!