Hard to fully use HTML5 when so many people still use browsers that don't support it. I'm comfortable using it for internal apps along with mobile stuff, but using it for a website for the consumer? We're not ready for that yet!
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I'm with cbVision. If you work on commercial websites, you have to deal with the simple fact that nearly 30% of users are still working with older versions of Internet Explorer that have little or no support for CSS3, let alone HTML5. According to StatCounter, nearly 10% are still using IE6 or 7, over 20% are using IE8. While IE9's share is growing, it's going to be a couple of years yet before Windows XP usage falls low enough that designers can set their minimum support levels below IE8.
At best, you can deploy those features that you can work around on older browsers or accept that some users won't see them. HTML5 is cool, but it's going to be limited to niches for the foreseeable future.
My post was an off the cuff remark. There's no reason why you can't use basic HTML5 features already.
If you want to use video or audio tags - take a look at jPlayer (or even the newest jwPlayer) that uses HTML5 if it's available and flash if it's not.
If you want to use all the new semantic tags - i.e. nav, article, header, footer, time, etc - use modernizr (or, if you only want to use the elements use html5shim) and have it display fine in all browsers.
There are definitely features that we can't use, but with the use of some of these polyfills, I've been using the above techniques on everyday-consumer websites for the past 8 months with no complaints from any of our clients' very demographically diverse user bases.
I've switched careers...
I'm NO LONGER a scientist,
but now a web developer...
awesome.
Wouldn't using modernizr or html5shim require your IE non-supported users have JavaScript enabled?
Modernizr has always puzzled me. The site looks terrible in IE8 ... not nearly as good as it does in Chrome. I feel like a lot of people (not all) who use this stuff are in the mindset of "make it work in IE, and make it pretty everywhere else." This is simply not acceptable to me. IE people like pretty websites too.
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When I say "modernizr has always puzzled me", I don't mean the concept or how to use it. Their website does't look good in IE8, so why would I want to use a tool that is suppose to be used for making websites better cross-browser?
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I agree with cbVision. CSS3 and HTML5 are awesome and cool, but until IE8 and older are out of the picture, the new goodies just aren't practical. Currently IE8 is the most used browser, and its market share isn't dropping terribly quickly. I suspect it'll be at least another 3-5 years before we can safely use CSS3 and HTML5.
aj_nsc is correct that we can use the new doctype, and with some JS help, we can use the other HTML5 tags as well. Though, there really isn't any practical benefit to doing so. Visual browsers don't care if you're styling a <section> or a <div>; Google has stated, I believe, that HTML5 tags don't affect your page rank; and the most used screen reader, Jaws, doesn't do anything special with the HTML5 tags.
I agree with Jeff. Sure, my HTML looks pretty much like it would if it was HTML5 anyway (i.e. <ul id="nav"> instead of <nav><ul> idea) for all serious production websites. I have had great fun with canvas and audio for my own stuff though!
Great wit and madness are near allied, and fine a line their bounds divide.
Poll: Are you using HTML5 yet?
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