I do, however, have time to plug a piece I’ve been working on for quite a while: a cover story for Technology Review.

It’s about HTML5, the next-generation version of the web’s most fundamental language — a technology that’s taken years to develop, caused countless arguments along the way… and that promises great things. It’s partially an attempt to help people grok what is actually going on, partially an attempt to explain how we got where we are today (a fascinating story in itself) and partially a riposte to Chris Anderson’s recent “the web is dead” argument in Wired. I hope it stands up well.

Writing it was a lot of hard graft, but I’ve now got a sharp understanding of what HTML5 is, what it isn’t, and what it can and can’t do. If you want to discuss it drop me a line.

(A note: the piece is behind a paywall. They’ve just changed strategy on free/paid stories, — as editor Jason Pontin explains here — so you’ll have to stump up to read it.)