Question

I was wondering if it it too early to use HTML5 for a production site. Should I rather wait 6-12 months until users have updated to compatible html5 browsers?
This leads me to, how far back does the browsers support HTML5?

Answer 1

http://caniuse.com/ has an excellent overview of which features are available, on which browsers – and information on available Javascript/Flash workarounds.

http://www.modernizr.com/ is an excellent library to detect which features are supported on the client browser.

As for HTML5 itself, the term has become a portmanteau for a lot of specifications – new markup, CSS3, canvas…

You have to ask yourself the right questions:

• Who are you making this site for?
  • What kind of IE6 support does your client want? In particular, can you make a site that will have some more features on “non-IE6 browsers”, at the cost of nearly no development time?
• What features do you want to use?
  • Some features bring semantic sugar but are not really worth the hassle – even when “supported”. (<article>, <date>…)
  • Some features bring (mostly) eye-candy, but absence of support won’t usually break your site. (CSS3 corners, HTML5 forms)
  • Some features can become the cornerstone of your site (<canvas>, <video>), especially if you want your site to be accessible from smartphones. (Even with Android getting Flash, I suspect many users won’t activate it if not forced in order to spare battery life)
• What features can you afford to use?
  • Some features degrade extremely gracefully – that is, you don’t have any work to do when the browser offers no support, and people with non-supporting browsers won’t even notice that they are missing on something (HTML5 forms)
  • Most useful features have relatively widespread workarounds for non-supporting browsers (mostly IE), generally implemented in Javascript or Flash. (HTML5 stylable markup, CSS3 corners, <video>, <canvas>) – but it will come at a price in site performance and design time.

Short answer: As a hobbyist web designer (so don’t take that advice as more than a barely informed piece of opinion), I do not think it is too early – if your website needs to be accessible on the iPhone and iPad, it will need HTML5 for some features. If your website needs to be accessible from people who are on IE6, then of course the set of available HTML5 functionality is quite limited (Heck IE6 barely supports CSS2.1) – but the most important bits (<video>, <canvas>) have workarounds available.