What is HTML5?

HTML5 is a language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web, a core technology of the Internet. It is the latest revision of the HTML standard 

HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML4, but XHTML1 and DOM2HTML (particularly JavaScript) as well

In particular, HTML5 adds many new syntactical features. These include the <video>, <audio>, and <canvas> elements, as well as the integration of SVG content. These features are designed to make it easy to include and handle multimedia and graphical content on the web without having to resort to proprietary plugins and APIs

Ian Hickson of Google, Inc., is the editor of HTML5.