While Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun duke it out with proprietary technologies for implementing multimedia on the Web, HTML 5 has the potential to eat these vendors’ lunches, offering Web experiences based on an industry standard. In fact, one expressed goal of the standard is to move the Web away from proprietary technologies such as Flash, Silverlight, and JavaFX. “It would be a terrible step backward if humanity’s major development platform [the Web] was controlled by a single vendor the way that previous platforms such as Windows have been”, says HTML 5 co-editor Ian Hickson, a Google employee.