Technology's so very annoying. Just when you get to grips with something, along comes something else that overtakes it and leaves you stranded on an island of useless expertise. A recent causality in the technowar is Adobe Flash, which the company had pushed for years for viewing what Adobe calls 'expressive applications' but what the rest of us call multimedia. Originally developed by Macromedia which Adobe swallowed years ago, Flash is a tool for adding video, animations and more engaging interactivity to websites. In recent years it has been battling a trifle fruitlessly for wider acceptance, especially in the mobile market.

So why has it gone south? It wasn't only Steve Jobs's refusal to allow Flash anywhere near an Apple device OS. Bigger players such as Google and Microsoft, plus the market, is why Flash has been dropped. The market has embraced an altogether fleeter alternative, the same fleet alternative that Apple and Google et al have opted for: HTML5.

The Hypertext Mark-up Language version 5 is the latest iteration of HTML, the language of the internet. HTML is an XML application originally designed in 1990 to provide the building blocks of web pages, a sort of page layout tool for websites. HTML became an international standard in 1997 and HTML5 adds tools for greater interoperability and to improve cross-platform mobile applications. And unlike Flash HTML5 is not proprietary.

This may seem completely irrelevant if you're stuck with your nose to the daily wide-format grindstone, but there is a reason why the end of Flash should matter to you. If for instance you are doing work for cross-media customers, you and they need to be aware that Flash is fast becoming a legacy format. Adobe is supporting Flash for the time being, but it has declared a commitment to HTML5 so that support could soon evaporate.

The impact of HTML5 on the sign and display market is unlikely to be felt any time soon. But nonetheless formats matter and the greater the transparency in file processing the better, because errors and workflow halts cost money. Features such as 3D Animation Rendering or the Geolocation API are unlikely to be of much interest to a wide-format PSP. But Local Devices Support, which enables access to connected devices such as a USB, could well be relevant for customers who want to collect work close to its point of use. Appreciating what data formats can do isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but the mobile model and distributed media production shape the business landscape for all companies, including sign and display printers.