Question

I’m beginning a very large project in the coming weeks and am trying to decide if I should take the leap into HTML5 land or stick with my time trusted XHTML 1 strict.

The site will be huge. Thousands of pages, video, custom CMS system, lots of social media integration, etc. I’m trying to justify using the new technology, but am unsure (as I’ve never done a huge site in 5) if everything will go according to plan on older browsers.

I can sit there and talk all day long about the new technology that html5 brings, but when you’re sitting in a board room full of execs and the site doesn’t work on their IE6 machines…not good.

Let me know what you guys would do. – Thanks

Answer 1

While HTML5 is not fully complete, much of it can be used today. It was designed with compatibility in mind, so a number of the new elements will work in older browsers, even if they don’t specifically support HTML5.

You can start using the new doctype – any browser will recognize it as valid. From there, you can do your layouts using the new semantic structural elements – section, aside, header, footer, etc. You’ll need to style these a bit to get them appearing correctly, and there is a shiv script for IE compatibility. It takes a little work, but they provide much more semantic value than the generic div.

audio and video elements have fallback capabilities for older browsers, so by all means use them.

Various new form elements and attributes are not widely supported yet, so you probably won’t get much value from them right now. Though I quite look forward to using them, as they will reduce need for client-side scripting a fair bit.

IE6 is the obvious element in the room, but with the right setup, and use of fallbacks in HTML5, there should be no serious issues from using HTML5. CSS is another matter, of course. But IE9 is looking rather good, and will help to raise the bar for standards support.