Don't Ignore HTML 5 Because of Internet Explorer

That’s like saying don’t ignore web design because of IE ha ha. I think most of us that have coded for a while know that IE is always behind everyone else and a right pain at times.

Yes, and we should be early adopters of HTML4 too. the sad part is that with all the nice things that advanced versions of HTML can do we (general business website developers) must be compliant with our audience and that includes IE versions back to #6. Developing using HTML5 with only ‘fixing’ IE8 is not an option in our world.

I don’t know but I would guess that most Opera, Chrome, FireFox … users are ‘current’ with their respective releases. If one is developing for intranets then “advanced” capabilities are certainly the way to go.

@Gerry: I’m not sure that it’s possible to be an early adopter of HTML 4 when it’s been out and in use for 10+ years.

While you’re right, your web pages need to work for your clients, and if they are demanding that the pages must act the same for clients as far back as IE 6, then I feel sorry for you, as your job must be very difficult.

Of course, the shim that I link to will make the HTML 5 tags work in IE6 and 7 as well. And I’m posting about it for people who want to stay ahead of the technology. I’m not suggesting that you should submit HTML 5 sites to clients that require extreme backwards compatibility.

Good luck! And I hope that your clients abandon IE6 eventually. That browser is a bear to write for! You have my sympathy.

Well, I’m just wrapping the tags with divs or vice versa for now. Brings the semantics, while being also compatible.

And, besides the Shiv relies on JS, and this type of solution is not acceptable for me, and I suppose it should not be deemed acceptable in general.

For example:

nav
div class=”nav”
[...]
/div
/nav

Hope when I submit the comment, the above example will still stand readable.

– Glad that you didn’t miss the dig at HTML-4. Until recently IE6 commanded at least 10% of the browser market and the demographics for a number of my clients shows that IE6 constitutes 20 (+)% of their site hits. It is our opinion that one should not have ‘broken code’ (e.g. not IE6 compliant) for that many visitors thus we grunt & sweat to make it so. It would be an interesting study as to the percentage of your web-developer readers who measure this metric for their sites and if the IE6 community makes up a “measurable’ number of their visitors. Ya can’t assume that the ‘crowd’ upgrades to the most current release – there is a lot of inertia to overcome.

Cheers,
=g=

@Gerry: Definitely. If your stats say that you get 10 or 20% of your visitors from IE6, then you should never serve them a broken page. But that doesn’t mean they have to receive the same level of quality as the people who are staying at least up-to-date with their software.

In fact, I wrote an article talking about this called Graded Browser Support where you assign “grades” to different browsers and versions and then decide what you will and won’t support for each. A browsers would get the full treatment, B browsers would get a scaled back approach, but still some support, C browsers (which is where I would put IE 6, these days) would get all the content, but any dynamic elements would be left off, and D and F browsers wouldn’t be supported at all. When you design that way, you’re still making sure that the customer (or the client’s customer) gets what they need (the content) without spending hundreds or thousands of hours (and equivalent $$) trying to get IE6 to display the rounded corners exactly how IE8 does (for example…).

However, I have worked on jobs where the boss at the time used an out-of-date browser (Netscape 4 in this case) and expected to be able to view the pages exactly how we designed them for more modern browsers. So, we had graded browser support plus the boss’s browser. Good times!

That solution only works when Javascript is enabled. Seems this also works without Javascript: http://www.debeterevormgever.nl/html5-ie-without-javascript/. If so, it’s a major step up.