A topic of debate that's seen a resurgence since the unveiling of the iPad is the issue of Flash versus HTML5. There are those that suggest that HTML5 will one day supplant/replace Adobe Flash.

I do not develop software that runs in a browser, so my (limited) understanding is:

• HTML is a pure-text markup language that is delivered over HTTP to a client browser. The client browser interprets the markup and renders (with varying degrees of success) the page according to an standard specification.
• Adobe Flash is a propriety framework for working with audio, video, sound and raster/vector graphics. It requires special authoring tools (a compiler perhaps?) and a custom player that's available as a plug-in to most common browsers.

Could someone please explain (to this C/C++ developer) how it is possible from a technical/coding point-of-view that a text-based markup language (HTML5) could be considered a replacement to a multimedia framework (Flash)?

Please no opinionated arguments - just technical facts.