A Scottish church has converted to HTML5, and is now streaming its services in a form that iPads and iPhones can understand, as well as to Flash-capable devices.

St Andrew’s Parish Church in Bo’ness, West Lothian, believes it is the first to stream its services in real time to iPhones and iPads, and more than doubled its normal Sunday attendance with online participants, reports “eWeek Europe” (http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/scottish-church-streams-services-to-ipads-7697 ). The church has had a Flash stream for a while, but added an iPhone-compatible stream for mobile devices for its service on June 13.

HTML5 is being developed as the next major revision of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the core markup language of the web. It’s touted as the next standard for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and DOM Level 2 HTML and is designed to to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in-based rich internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.