A survey conducted during September 2012 found that 94% of developers are either already actively developing with HTML5 or had plans to do so and that 82% saw HTML5 as important in their work context.

The survey was conducted by Kendo UI, the arm of Telerik that sells several suites of HTML5 tools, so it can hardly be considered unbiased. But it does paint a very different picture from the Gartner's prediction earlier this year that wide adoption of HTML5 is still 5 to 10 years away.

The survey methodology was to email everyone on Telerik's e-mail list, including those who had signed up for the monthly KendoUI newsletter and it produced over 4000 responses and only 6% of the developers surveyed had no plans to use HTML5 in 2012.

The answer to the question, “When do you think HTML5 will be important for your job?” indicated that widespread HTML5
adoption is well underway and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Fifty one percent (51%) of respondents already regard HTML5 as important to their jobs, an additional 43% indicate that it will become important within the next 2 years leaving only 1% feeling that HTML5 will never be important to their jobs.

Asked what makes HTML5 development more appealing than other options for writing software, the top reasons are familiarity of languages (72%) and reach/cross-platform support
(62%). 

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Related to the benefits of cross-platform support, the survey also asked respondents which platforms they used for web development. Again the results show a bias - this time towards .NET - attributable to this being a Telerik survey with the majority, 57% nominating ASP.NET MVC as their top platform followed by ASP.NET WebForms (42%):

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The majority  of respondents (55%) claimed to use two to three different platforms for their projects suggesting that developers are pragmatic when it comes to picking platforms with HTML5, and are willing to use multiple solutions to get the job done.

The survey had some specific questions to answer. In particular it wanted whether know the various controversies that have been widely covered regarding HTML5 had impacted developer opinion.

In particular it asked about Facebook’s decision to launch a “native” version of the Facebook app for iOS, expecting that this would have a negative impact on developers - something that could only have been strengthened by Mark Zuckerber's statement at TechCrunch Disrupt on September 12th, midway through the survey period (September 5th and 26th) that Facebook's HTML5 app "one of the biggest mistakes if not the biggest strategic mistake that we made". However, despite the amount of media attention to the Facebook fiasco, 73% of developers surveyed said it had "No impact" on their level of confidence in HTML5 and of those who claimed an impact as many claimed it increased their confidence as decreased it!

On the other hand, despite major improvements in modern browsers and increased standardization, browser fragmentation is still a major concern for developers with 71% admitting to being "concerned") about this issue:

Answers to another question revealed that developers prefer the W3C ("slow and steady") or WHATWG ("living standard") in a ratio of 4:1, possibly suggesting they had not caught up with news that W3C now plans to finalize its standard by 2014.