I’ve come across a few rather disturbing instances in the marketing of authoring software lately. I guess it’s not too much of a surprise, since vendors are now pretty much tripping over themselves to deliver content to the iPad (and now all mobile devices), but it’s disturbing nonetheless.

The trend — or maybe it’s too soon to call it a trend, and I hope it doesn’t become one — is that vendors are claiming that their software “publishes to HTML5″, when in fact it just takes the content — which may well be interactive — and publishes it to video. Which pretty much makes it worthless.

I sat in on the HTML5 Morning Buzz at DevLearn and also presented on HTML5 authoring tools (and I will do a longer post on that soon, I promise). I can tell you there’s still a lot of misinformation floating around, and (shocker) it looks like there are some vendors trying to take advantage of it.

I try to keep onehundredfortywords readers pretty well informed about HTML5 in the elearning world, but here’s another point to take to heart: Any authoring tool and any output is only good if it serves your design, which serves the learning/business need. Flawless publishing to HTML5 doesn’t do you any good if the tool isn’t capable of creating — and publishing — the interactivity you’ve designed.