Adobe releases Edge beta, a new HTML5-based animation tool

Adobe recently released the beta of Adobe Edge, a new web motion and interaction design tool that allows designers to bring animated content to websites, using web standards like HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language for describing Web pages), JavaScript (the programming language used for Web apps), and CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheets for formatting and animation effects).

While Flash is a huge part of Adobe's business, we learned during interviews with Mark Anders (above) this year that HTML5 animation and motion graphics is also something that Adobe is working on supporting. What's the big deal with HTML5, it is an emerging standard that should work on all platforms without any plugins so it can be even more ubiquitous than Flash in the long run. Developers who are interested can download the beta here.