A logo is a critical element of a brand. Now the W3C is attempting to brand the emerging HTML5 web standard with a new logo.
Looks decent enough to me, and considering that HTML 4 and XHTML (transitional or otherwise) never had any such ‘brands’, this is a new step for web dev standards, kinda/sorta.
Much of the debate lately around HTML5 has centered around the video and audio tags that HTML5 introduces — but those are just small parts of a much larger and robust reworking of the web. Canvas and CSS3 (I know now a little outside, but..) effectively remake the way web developers have been building sites and for Apple (at least) help to enable an effective replacement for Adobe Flash.
The problem with HTML5 continues to be the fact that the specification is not yet complete and frankly considering the lack of consensus on some items — it might still take awhile.