SANTA CLARA, California — The man credited with founding the world wide web is both excited and cautious about its future.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British physicist who first designed the way web servers deliver pages to web browsers nearly 19 years ago, sees great promise in HTML5, the planned and much-anticipated rewrite of the language used to build web pages.

“I think (HTML5) is great,” he said at the Worldwide Web Consortium’s (W3C) annual member gathering, which takes place here this week.

HTML5 is a mixture of several different technologies that allow content creators to do more with web pages. It defines rules for presenting video, audio, mathematical equations, complex layouts, 2-D animations and non-standard typefaces. Each bit of technology has its own working group within the W3C chartered with developing that one component.

“We’ve had the pieces for a while,” he says. “Seeing all these things finally coming together is exciting, and it multiplies the power of each one,” Berners-Lee says.

HTML5 also enhances the way browsers can store and process dat