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Mobile development company appMobi wants to push HTML5. It does not want to do this just as a developer framework or an alternative for publishers who are pondering native apps vs. Web apps. AppMobi wants to push HTML5 as its own mobile platform, capable of taking on Android and iOS from an application level.

Last week, the company added a new tool to its HTML5 developer tool kit to further boost HTML5 development. The appMobi Chrome App Packager enables developers to build Web apps and browser extensions and wrap them for submission to the Chrome Web Store.

It used to be called the Windows Professional Developers Conference. This year, it absorbs some of the functions of the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, and some of the MIX Web developers' conference. The result is Build 2011 in Anaheim, which this year is Microsoft's premiere event for the next version of Windows for PCs and tablets. It begins Tuesday, but at this moment, exactly how it will pan out remains an artificial mystery.

His brainchild is SproutCore, a JavaScript library whose goal is to accelerate HTML5 apps on multiple platforms, including tablets, so their execution speed approaches that of native apps. Charles Jolley began work on SproutCore at Apple, and was a key architect for Apple's vision of HTML5: a standards-driven effort that could yet be maneuvered to showcase Apple's strengths.

But one of that effort's first culminations was MobileMe, Apple's first attempt at a data-syncing service for Mac and iPod/iPhone customers. That effort became synonymous with "disaster," one which then-CEO Steve Jobs promised to rebuild. Not very good with failures, Apple let MobileMe languish, and its HTML5 message was dialed down. Rumors such as a reconceiving of the iWork platform diminished, and eventually Jolley left Apple, taking SproutCore with him.

Within the next year or so, a flood of HTML5-based Web apps will be coming to mobile devices. It will likely start with games and dedicated applications like e-readers and move to more general use apps like news sites. Companies like Facebook and Amazon will be at the tip of the spear. The next wave will be sophisticated developers that see the power of HTML5 as an alternative to the native application model.

It is not a foregone conclusion, but the rise of Web app stores is a likely future. Facebook's so-called "Project Spartan" may be driving the shift but other outlets such as news companies may be looking for a way to skirt the strict rules of the Apple App Store or the chaos of the Android Market and create their own centralized hubs for magazine-like Web apps as digital newsstands. Looking ahead, will Web app stores become the dominant model? That is the question for this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

There are some undercurrents swiftly moving through developments circles that will soon become the topic everybody will be discussing. Among those topics, one significantly stands out in the mobile realm - the coming wave of HTML5 Web-based apps. The vanguard is being led by mobile games developers but the rest of ecosystem is not far behind. Facebook's so-called "Project Spartan" is the carrot that has spurred app developers but the ability to disrupt the application store model is high on developers' minds.

In talks with developers last week, the common refrain was "I do not have anything to say about Project Spartan." But app developers know that Project Spartan is coming - they are working with Facebook and soon the Web will see the benefits of their labors. The responses were not "I do not know if it is true or not, I have no idea." Rather they were "I cannot talk about that." The social games developers are leading the way of a trend that could be extremely disruptive to the native app economy.

Tristan Louis is a colleague and insightful analyst. Over the weekend, he took a look at the top 20 sites according to Alexa and ran them through the W3C HTML validator to see who is playing by the rules and who still has some catching up to do.

Surprisingly, MSN.com was the sole site among the top 20 to completely pass, and Amazon had the most page errors - more than 500 of them with more than 100 particular warnings - "showing that dis­regard for standard com­pliance does not seem to have an impact on economic performance," he says in his blog post.

It might not be long before the phrase "new version of Firefox" ends up being not very thrilling at all. On schedule, just six weeks after the organization gave the final go-ahead to release Firefox 5 (the "dot-oh" is oh, so 2010), this afternoon installed versions of version 5 were buzzing their users that Firefox 6 was available.

It's part of an ambitious new scheduling plan by the Mozilla organization to expedite new features as rapidly as possible, in the wake of increased competition from Google Chrome, whose latest stable release is version 13, and whose dev channel release is on the tail end of 14. But the plan has met resistance recently from developers and IT personnel who claim six weeks is not enough turn-around time to test a new release before distributing it to users in their enterprise.

LinkedIn has launched a major overhaul of its mobile apps for iPhone and Android, as well as a brand new HTML5 mobile Web app. It's a complete redesign, forgoing the larger grid of menu options in favor of four key sections: Updates, You, Inbox, and Your Network. The previous menu had too many choices, and some of the titles weren't intuitive. What's the difference between "News" and "Buzz?" Why are "Connections," "Reconnect" and "Invitations" all separate buttons? The new screen simplifies the navigation options.

The update also adds new features. This release addresses what LinkedIn reports is "the #1 most requested feature" from its members, allowing users to access LinkedIn Groups from the native apps (though not from the Web app). The app has also been rearranged to open by displaying the Updates stream, which LinkedIn says is "one of the most frequently used areas of the current mobile app."

The twentieth anniversary of the World Wide Web was celebrated worldwide a few days ago, which says something quite compelling about the state of the Web itself. As ReadWriteWeb Editor-in-Chief Richard MacManus personally verified two years ago by interviewing the guy who thought up the thing in the first place, the Web was established in 1989.

Historically, facts have been considered impediments to good stories. That is until recently, when not even the literary equivalent of blinking neon "FAIL" signs have stopped entirely apocryphal stories from propagating like mercury. Just ask any Internet Explorer user with a high IQ: When the opportunity for a juicy headline arises, such trifle things as facts, math, and common sense don't even amount to blips on the Web's radar.

The original, grand scheme for the Web was that information would be served up on multiple sites that would all link to one another. The world would be one, big encyclopedia. As it turned out, informational and educational sites have become massive repositories of articles and markup, some of which compete with one another; and news sites such as this one have become separate, self-standing feats of ingenuity.

The problem is that it's not much of a Web any more, or at least less of one that was originally intended. This is a problem that HTML5's architects are hoping to solve, by means of new systems that would enable services from the outside (like search engines) to make more and better sense of the data being maintained by servers on the inside.