Usually when people discuss the chances that JavaFX will take off (or not) in the marketplace, they see it battling with existing offerings like Adobe’s Flash (and its descendants) and Microsoft’s Silverlight. But lately there’s been a bit of buzz about the possibility that HTML 5 will be able to do most of what those technologies do, including video — and be completely open and not owned by a major corporation to boot.Of course, there’s a catch, and that catch is that HTML 5 won’t be ready for another five years, and who knows what the landscape will look like then. But already the battle lines are being drawn, and Silicon Valley giants who don’t already have a dog in the RIA fight, like Google and Apple, are getting behind HTML 5 in a big way. What’s most interesting to me about this is that HTML 5 is being talked about in much of the same way that Java was back in the mid-90s — as an operating system killer. It’s true that HTML 5 will soon start facing the same hard realities that Sun faced when trying to really implement its write once, run anywhere promise (the first being Microsoft’s reluctance to implement all the proposed HTML 5 features in Internet Explorer 8). But whereas Sun had to create the JVM from scratch, HTML 5 piggybacks onto 15 years of work on creating a more or less standardized environment that works on multiple platforms — the Web browser. It would be ironic to see HTML itself do what Java never could in its quest to be the Internet application language of choice. JavaHTML