HTML5 has some amazing possibilities ahead of it but none of that eradicates Flash's future. Fantasizing and circlejerking about that possibility is just retarded -plugins fill a void the W3C and browser vendors can't do themselves - and that is keeping up.
What are your needs in 5 years and what makes you think HTML5 is somehow perfectly anticipating them? How about 10 years? How about even one year from now?
Are you going to upgrade any software at all you use over the next 5 years? Or did they all get it perfect too?
I've lived in a world where I couldn't access online banking if I was using anything as exotic as Mozilla on Linux. Thankfully, the situation has improved a bit since those days, but I would never want to return to them. Note that today you don't have to stray very far from the mainstream before Adobe stops delivering their plugin. The web should be such that it can be used on innovative platforms without being at the mercy of one CEO who doesn't like another CEO that day, or thinks your FreeBSD or Plan 9 or Haiku are too marginal, or that your CPU instruction set insufficiently ubiquitous.
For the end user, what's the difference between "require a plugin" and "require a browser"?
I don't.
> In 5 years why should the web require a plugin to show video or vector graphics?
It shouldn't, but both your questions seem quite unrelated.
