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Asked: 2026-05-14T21:21:22+00:00

I am a designer whose main marketing strategy is multi browser compatibility. I assure

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I am a designer whose main marketing strategy is multi browser compatibility. I assure my clients that the site will work even in IE6 (!).

Of late i have been pondering over the question of moving to HTML 5. The reason behind my apprehension is that IE6 is still a major player in terms of market share and i don’t want to lose it.

Is there any way of moving to HTML 5 and still promise multi browser compatibility?

Thank you.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Yes, by taking baby steps.

    To start with, you can switch to the HTML5 doctype: <!DOCTYPE html>. This switches just about every browser out there into “standards” mode, the same as an HTML 4 strict doctype.

    Then there’s the new elements. Internet Explorer can’t natively style them, but a handy little bit of javascript fixes that up: http://code.google.com/p/html5shiv/

    If you or your tools aren’t ready for that (e.g. some CMSs strip out HTML tags they don’t understand), then in the interim you could use classes, e.g. instead of <article>, use <div class="article">.

    As for the new form controls, they’re backwards compatible too. So <input type="email"> will work exactly the same way as <input type="text"> in browsers that don’t support it. If necessary you can use javascript to fill in the gaps. See http://diveintohtml5.ep.io/forms.html for more on that.

    As for <video> and <audio>, you can fall back to <object> for older browsers – e.g. http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody. Meanwhile <canvas> can be emulated in javascript, e.g. http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/.

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