Like the wizened old wizard, Merlin speaking to young Arthur or the sage Jedi Knight, Obi-Wan Kenobi, teaching his star pupil, Luke Skywalker, Imran Malek, senior business development manager at MocoSpace, had some words of wisdom for anyone planning to attend the annual DevCon5 conference in New York City.

“Believe in HTML5. It’s further along than you think.”

Malek, who has been with MocoSpace since November of 2010, describes his role in the company as bringing games to as many people as possible. In fact, he often brings those games to his family members first, using them as his own personal quality assurance team.

As part of the bigger picture, Malek sees the mobile Web via HTML5 as a huge opportunity for his company, and notes HTML5 is changing the way MocoSpace hires developers. Rather than looking for engineers who are proficient strictly in C++, the company is instead looking for well rounded JavaScript and Web engineers.

Malek himself is an Apple (News – Alert) devotee, heaping praise on his smartphone of choice. “I use an iPhone 4S,” he told TMCnet in an exclusive interview. “I can’t let it go, it’s a wonderful device with great battery life and it does everything I want it to do.”

Perhaps because of this devotion – or maybe due to the company’s prominence in the smartphone market – Malek feels that Apple, as well as Google, needs to take a leadership position in the promotion of HTML5, pointing out that “Until Apple and Google (News – Alert) find a way to make money off of HTML5, native experiences will always be better.”

As for the future, Malek believes that tablets will become a third category of websites, in addition to desktop and mobile versions, as responsive design continues to evolve.

If there was any doubt that Malek was a big fan of HTML5, one just has to ask him where HTML5 has the most impact on user experience. “I would say the front end experience is what makes HTML5 so awesome.” And that, coming from the Jedi Master of HTML5, is high praise indeed.