I had the pleasure of attending Mobile Retail Summit in London yesterday. An OK event, but kind of missed the innovative ideas to how mobile can bridge the gap between online and offline shopping experiences. Especially from the tech vendors and agencies that are supposed to help retailers in the right direction. So I was pretty surprised when Duncan Hallas from Netbiscuits stated

“HTML5 is fantastic, but it’s a web standard – not a mobile web standard”.

WTF? You lost me…

“HTML5 is fantastic, but it’s a web standard – not a mobile web standard.”-Duncan Hallas, Netbiscuits#mretailsummit

— Mobile Marketing (@MMMagTweets) January 26, 2012

So Netbiscuits is relying on mobile web standards like XHTMLMP?

Even if I am still not quite comfortable with how W3C defined the term “One Web” HTML5 is for sure one step in the right direction. If us mobilists denies HTML5 as a web standard, for all capable devices, we are pretty stupid! HTML5 is all good for mobile! HTML5 is the first standard that really is taking mobile seriously (…at least when we speak of HTML5 as an umbrella term covering CSS3 and device APIs) enabling fantastic things on hand held devices!

It is true that HTML5 does not solve all problems in the mobile web space, but, dear Retailer, if your vendor tells you that HTML5 is not good for mobile web, ditch him!