That finally leaves us to talk about HTML5. Long story short, it's a crippled platform and its in the biggies' best interests to keep it that way. If HTML5 apps were allowed to be first class citizens on a platform where would app revenues come from for elGoog Apple and MSFT? So on the face though everyone is trumpeting and acting as if championing the cause of html5 no one really does it. Think of key features like notifications, media control elements (webcam/mic etc), sensors and everything else which you'd need to write a decent app on a mobile platform.
HTML5 is just as platform independent as any other web standard before. it. i.e it comes broken out of the box as far a standard is concerned. It all sounds good theoretically on paper to say that you develop once and run on multiple platforms. But the ground realty is nowhere close. CSS, HTML and JavaScript don't work the same way or perform the same way in all browsers due to each browser developer doing an independent implementation of the standards and often throwing in some non standard stuff in there as well. HTML5 is a development channel that can be used across platforms, but one should not pick it with the intention that you can write once and run on every platform without issues. The time to ship would come out same whether you implement native apps or whether you go the Web route.
I'd say stop thinking multi/cross plat and focus instead on JS to start with. If you ask me JS is the language of the future. Even today we arelooking to hire a JS wizard who knows no other language for a kings ransom and we find none. You'd do your career a wealth of good being a JS pro. Its not called the assembly language of the internet for nothing.
JavaScript is dead easy to pickup and start coding. There isn't much learning curve. I haven't coded in JavaScript all my life, and yet I had absolutely no problem implementing JS framework that provides connectivity to our back end TCP Services with zero learning time and this framework is going to be the base for all our mobile HTML5 game clients. I took less than half the time the "pro" JS developers in the client team thought they needed for it and their QA was unable to find any defects either.
Strangely, the actual client development team which is comprised of the so called "pro" web developers who knew little beyond JS do not find it so easy to write defect free code or more importantly they have a hard time debugging issues in JS code quickly. I believe that my key advantage is that I come from a C++ programming background. Most of the time, a JS only "pro" is not even a programmer in the first place and lacks severely in the basic fundamentals of good programming and the general outlook of a programmer and works with only the knowledge of language syntax and the libraries.
Lastly, there is no such thing as the language of the future. If there is one language that has longevity, a language that was used in the past, used now and will be used in the future, that would be C/C++.
Even the famous JavaScript engines like Spider Monkey, V8, Nitro, that it runs on are all written in C/C++ and such things are going to be written in C++ for some foreseeable future. A JS Developer may not really bother about the underlying engine in the browser, but still, I believe that someone who has a strong programming background especially with a language like C++ would find it real easy to work with JS or any other language for that matter.
As far as Multi-platform development goes, I believe in native application development over something like HTML5.
BTW, my company is also not relying on purely HTML5/JS for mobile development, we have native app development also happening in parallel.