I currently work for a large company and I design for their high-traffic ecommerce website. We support tens-of-thousands of users across a variety of browsers. Our current browser stats point to most people using either Firefox 3+ and IE8. There are about 5% of users still on IE6.
Is it time to start coding for the future and impliment HTML5 across the site? Is it a responsible thing to do or should I wait a year for people to upgrade to better supporting browsers?
Thank you.
HTML5 isn't one specific thing. You can start using it even in browsers that have no idea what HTML5 is. If you just start using some of the extra tags or form types, they degrade perfectly into standard elements in older browsers. Video needs a Flash fallback anyway. The advanced scripting features all need fallbacks for non-supporting browsers anyway, or must only add non-essential functionality.
In short, sure, start using HTML5 techniques now to provide advantages for cutting-edge browsers, just make sure it all degrades nicely in older browsers.
IE8 doesnt support most of HTML5.
There are libraries you can use to make it more HTML5 aware; but for a large production site I think your better of waiting a year.
I would say that the 5% of users still on IE6 will probably remain on IE6. They either aren't interested in upgrading (perhaps they don't know about these things), or are restricted to IE6 by security policies in their workplace. In particular I've found that a number of our clients are not upgrading from IE6 because their IT teams consider it to be too big a change, or their existing software is not compatible with anything else.
Therefore, my advice is: go HTML5. With a bit of work you can work around IE6's deficiencies (look at Modernizr, CSS3PIE for ideas). And that way, the other 95% of customers get a better experience.
... what is "large"? Considering HTML5 is still considered work in progress, I'd vote no.
The name "HTML5" is tending to be used by most people at the moment to describe all the exciting new features in web browsers. Not all of these features are actually part of the HTML5 spec - for example, CSS and Javascript have new features which are being referred to under the HTML5 banner. I'm going to assume you mean all these features.
My answer would be to investigate which features you can implement, but remain backward-compatible. Many of the features of HTML5, CSS3, etc can be added to your site without making it un-usable for older browsers.
Some examples: (but do spend time researching for more)
New input types, such as <input type='date'> and <input type='number'>These give you new features in a modern browser, but old browsers will still show a normal input field.
More info: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201004/html5_input_types/
Semantic HTML5 tags, such as <section>, <footer>, etc.
These give you additional semantic meaning to your HTML tags, which is good for SEO and other automated systems that look at your site. They are broadly backward-compatible, though in order to support them in IE6/7/8, you will need to include an IE hack such as HTML5Shiv. However, I would suggest using Modernizr, which includes the HTML5Shiv plus a stack of other useful functionality.
Some CSS3 features such as border-radius. IE doesn't know about this, but the result is that IE will have square corners and other browsers will have rounded corners. So nothing that breaks the site for IE users.
But if you really want to, IE can be made to support a number of CSS3 features, including border-radius, using tools such as CSS3Pie.
Instead of using SVG graphics directly, use a Javascript graphics library such as Raphael, which will draw SVG in browsers that support it, and fall back to VML for IE (which will even work in IE6).
Obviously stuff like the <video> or <canvas> tags aren't going to work in older browsers, but frankly, it'll take you long enough just implementing the features you can use straight away; by the time you're ready to take a step further, things will have moved on anyway.
Related
Features of HTML5 are no doubt very compelling but is it a good time to start development in HTML5 ?
I just have started development in HTML5 and realized at the time even not all HTML5 input types are supported by all browsers. It means it is not sure about basic stuff like input forms.
Please share how you are managing these things ? (Using HTML5 code with browsers currently supporting HTML5)
HTML 5 is still under development so you've got to be careful. Certain features, such as the more basic ones like <header> and <footer>, are less likely to change before the final release. The doctype decleration is unlikely to change. I wouldn't rely on the multimedia support as supported formats vary widely accross browsers.
The momentum behind HTML5 is strong and it is indeed a good time to get started if you have not already.
At the lowest level, you would need to write feature detection in your pages to see if the particular browser supports the HTML5 feature that you want to use.
I suggest the following:
Use sites like caniuse.com to determine the current support for a particular feature across browsers.
Use templates like HTML5 Boilerplate, which give you a structure for the HTML5 page that you can use , with support for various shims that bring in support for HTML5 features in older browsers.
If you prefer doing the detection yourself, use a library like Modernizr.
As with all cross-browser development, you can never rely on any support in the browser. If you target older browsers, then do not rely on HTML5 features. I haven't had problems with using the HTML5 doctype in older browsers, but specific features can be troublesome — e.g. you can use <header> elements, but IE won't let you style them in any way as it disregards header styles as invalid.
As long as you need to support old enough browsers, it will never be a good time to start using HTML5. The only thing that decides whether it's okay to use HTML5 is which browsers you want to support.
HTML5 is much easier then previous ones, It has developed allot in input fields, though its still under development and not complete yet.
You can check here http://html5test.com/ which browser supports HTML5 how much?
Currently, Chrome is the best that supports the HTML5 more than any other web browser.
-Thanks.
Take a look at the table in this wikipedia article. There is a lot of variability amongst browsers as to which parts of HTML5 are currently supported. This website tests your web browser to see which features it supports, so install a bunch of different browsers on your computer and test them for yourself.
Is there any single framework with which I can build a css3, html5 website that is compatible for all browsers including IE7 and later? Can http://html5boilerplate.com/ boilerplate help me in this?
You will never get the IE7 or IE8 rendering engine to achieve full compatibility with HTML5, CSS3, and other modern technologies. They are simply not capable of it.
However there are some hacks, tools and plugins which can get you part of the way.
Tools like Modernizr will help you by allowing you to detect which features are supported, to give your site a chance to work around it.
jQuery is a great library anyway, but is particularly good in this context because it abstracts a lot of browser differences away from the developer. Some things are easy in most browsers but a real pain in IE; jQuery takes a lot of that kind of stuff and makes it easy regardless.
Dean Edwards' IE7.js and Selectivzr are both Javascript libraries that give IE support for lots of the CSS selectors which were missing in older versions. This allows you to write your stylesheets without worrying so much about what IE supports. (IE7.js also fixes a number of IE's other glitches and missing features too)
CSS3Pie is a hack for IE that adds support for CSS border-radius, gradients and box-shadow.
There are in fact a whole load of hacks along these lines, all aimed at adding features to older versions of IE which it is missing. Modernizr's website has a big list of them here: https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/HTML5-Cross-Browser-Polyfills
However there is one big caveat to all of this. Speed. IE<=8 is a slow browser. It has a slow Javascript engine. Virtually all of these hacks are javascript based. You might get away with running a few of them on any given site, but trying to use enough of them to give IE anything like full support for HTML5 and CSS3 will slow the browser down to the point of being unusable.
There is one other angle to approach this question though, and that's Google's Frame plugin for IE. This basically installs the entire Google Chrome browser engine into IE. The user is still running the IE shell, but the web page is rendered as it would be in an up-to-date version of Chrome.
This sounds great, but of course it isn't perfect. The main down-side of it is that the end user has to install it manually onto their computer, which means that you as a web developer have no real control over whether it's there or not. So its not something you can just add to your site and expect everything to magically work.
Finally, you may also be interested in CanIUse.com, which gives browser support tables for various features, allowing you to see at a glance what is and what isn't supported in various versions of each browser.
HTML 5 is more an umbrella term for a variety of technologies than any one thing or framework. Really, any implementation you do should degrade gracefully-- and that is what makes the site browser compatible. Detect what the browser supports, and then have alternatives that are legacy friendly.
Check out: http://accessites.org/site/2007/02/graceful-degradation-progressive-enhancement/
And: http://diveintohtml5.ep.io/detect.html
Good luck.
Modernizr is an open-source JavaScript library that helps you build the next generation of HTML5 and CSS3-powered websites.
MS is including it in the ASP.net MVC template projects
html5boilerplate won't help you.
As others have said html5 and css3 are very broad terms, there's no framework that implements all of the features provided by both of these. In fact they are not equally supported in browsers that say that they support them. And more, even W3C guys (who write the specs for html5 and css3) are not yet established on what features they will include or what steps will be required to implement them. You get the idea...
But.. if you narrow your requirements to some specific features, like video, audio tags, canvas drawing, nifty css effects, File API, or others, you CAN find frameworks that implement (or try to mimic) them with available technologies in cross-browser manner (more or less).
I'm going to develop a theme for a WordPress blog but I'm not sure if I should do it using XHTML/CSS2 or if I already can do it using HTML5/CSS3.
Usually, I use 960.gs framework but it isn't available with HTML5/CSS3. I've heard that the 52framework works fine as well and I'm thinking about adopt it for my project, but I'm really insecure about HTML5's early adoption (?).
Someone, please, can help me to decide which technology adopt on my project.
Thanks a lot.
HTML5 and CSS3 are "ready to use" - you need to learn a little about the concept of "Polyfilling", but you can make the user experience very similar in all browsers, even if you lose a few transition effects and rounded corners along the way.
My website has been HTML5 since 2009 and I tested it across many, many browsers.
So the bottom line is, HTML5 is designed to be highly backwards compatible with HTML4.01 and there are lots of techniques for making content available to older browsers that don't support the more funky elements in HTML5.
The 960 grid system will work with HTML5 and CSS3 because it's just a list of classes. CSS3 doesn't really give you any grid layout features yet that are widely adopted enough to be helpful.
I would use CSS3 and HTML5 as much as you can but don't forget about progressive enhancement. Don't blindly ignore a browser because it doesn't support CSS3. You should use HTML5 and CSS3 appropriately and not because it's cool.
What audience are you designing it for? Do you need to be bleeding edge?
I would say use XHTML/CSS2 as that will be supported for years unless you need the functionality in the others.
Being an early adopter can be quite painful, so only do that if you have good reasons to.
Html5 and css3 for sure!
The only thing you might want to ask yourself is wether or not you want to use the new elements (article, aside, nav etc.) Because if you do, you need to depend on Javascript in order for IE to render your page correctly.
Every new page should be written with the new doctype imo:
<!DOCTYPE html>
If you want a starting template that works well in all major browsers you might want to check this out: http://html5boilerplate.com/
Whole-heartedly agree with Bravax.
It's all really based on who your audience is. If you want your site to be on the bleeding edge, regardless of audience, go for it.
I have heard great things about 52framework! I am about to implement it into a full-on 100+ page site redesign. The good thing about it, is that it plays nice with IE (even 6!).
It is entirely related to the markets you are aiming at. You will be able to have more interactive content and easier to maintain styles with CSS3. This said, many of the html5 and css3 elements are not yet standardized. Even among the modern, cutting-edge, browsers there can be major differences.
If you are making a theme for experimental purposes or to play around with, I would go with the newer technologies.
If you are making this for consumption on a wide sale, and potential sale, you really should avoid technologies not supported by older browers, IE 7 and 8 especially.
More of my clients lately are asking me about HTML 5 and I'm trying to get a sense of what to tell them. How long until all the major browsers have standard support for it? How long until I leave HTML 4 behind and only code new projects in HTML 5? What are you telling your clients?
Are they asking about specific HTML5 features or HTML5 in general? At my company we haven't said anything to the clients, but we do set the HTML5 doctype as well as using some HTML5 markup - but only markup that works in non-HTML5 compliant browsers. HTML5 doesn't necessary mean you discard older browsers, it depends on which features you implement. You can still use audio and video tags, as long as you keep a flash fallback - as an example. HTML5 form tags are poorly implemented even in bleeding edge browsers, so using them are not an option.
I suggest you read Dive Into HTML5 to see how you can work with HTML5 today, but still support non-HTML5 browsers.
I'll throw in another link; Modernizr is a JavaScript library that come in handy if you want use bleeding edge HTML5 or CSS3 features, it detects support for HTML5 tags and some (all?) CSS3 properties.
You've already gotten some good answers, but I'll chime in as well. I wouldn't give your client a blanket "yes" or "no" on html5. I'd take a look at what all has changed and then break it down into sections based on how well it's supported.
The Doctype:
Nothing is stopping you from switching to the html5 DOCTYPE today. Even browsers that don't understand html5's new tags (most notably IE 6-8) will recognize <!DOCTYPE html> as a valid doctype and not switch into quirks mode. After declaring that your document is an html5 document, you're free to use (or not use) html5's new tags to your heart's content. Personally, I've started using the html5 doctype on websites -- even if I have no immediate plans to use html5's new features -- because there isn't any negative side effect, and as a bonus I don't have to try to remember the correct way to write a doctype and charset everytime I start a new page (which I have to do with html4/xhtml).
New (Layout) Tags:
Next, you have to figure out why your client is interested in using html5 in the first place. My guess is that they're interested because it sounds trendy and cutting edge. In reality, one of the biggest benefits of many new tags (such as <section>, <nav>, <footer>, <aside>, etc) is that they make your code much more readable than it would be if the page was filled with <div>s everywhere. This is a great advantage for the coder (and in the future it might help with accessibility), but right now, this change probably makes very little difference to the client.
New Features (Video and Audio):
Alternative, the client might have specific html5 features that they want their site to use. Two of the most popular are the <video> and <audio> tags. The great thing about these is that you can easily fallback to Flash, so you don't have anything to lose (as far as browser support goes) by using them.
Complex Features:
Other popular new features are <canvas>, geolocation, and local storage (not exactly html5, but related). For these, the fallbacks (if they exist) require a lot more work on your part. If your client really wants these features, you'll need to figure out which browsers they (or their customers and site visitors) are using, and what percent of their target audience they're willing to leave behind.
Conclusion
That got a little long-winded; long story short, I'd tell your client this:
"I'll gladly start using some html5 features immediately. Remember, though, that the specification is not finalized, and it will continue to change over the next 10 years. Around 50-60% of our clients may be using browsers that don't support some of html5's new features, so we'll need to do thorough analysis before adding certain complex features of html5."
If the clients are OK with using the browsers that support HTML 5 for their applications, then why not :)
If they don't want to use the browsers (and versions) that doesn't support HTML 5, then they can't have it, thats what I would say.
Edit:
OK let me put it this way. If they are asking for a suggestion, then ask them what browsers and versions are they comfortable with, if they fall into the area where HTML 5 is supported, then tell them that they can move to HTML 5, adding that its in a nascent state, but support is growing at a good pace.
How long until all the major browsers have standard support for it?
Never. If you look at HTML5 as a whole (which you shouldn't), no broser will ever support it. For each browser, there will always be dozens of features defined in HTML5 which the given browser does not implement.
How long until I leave HTML 4 behind and only code new projects in HTML 5?
The language hasn't changed. It's still HTML. So, you cannot say "I code in HTML 4" or "I code in HTML5". You code in HTML.
HTML5 introduces new features. For each feature, you decide independently if you want to use it in your projects. There is stuff defined in HTML5 that you can use today. On the other side, there is stuff defined in HMTL5 that currently isn't implemented in any browser. The point is, it depends on the given feature.
Another key question is: What browser(s) do the majority of your clients use? Since medium to large size companies tend to be very resistant to changing browsers, what they use now is what they're likely to use for the forseeable future.
For clients using mostly Firefox, the answer is that Firefox supports a good deal of HTML5 now (version 3.6), & even more in version 4 (2011). For clients using mostly IE, they'll have to wait until version 9 (2011).
I'd like to start using HTML5's basic features, but at the same time, keep my code backwards compatible with older browsers (graceful degradation). For instance, I'd like to use the cool CSS3 properties for making rounded corners. Is there any available tutorial for writing gracefully degradable HTML5 ?
Additionally, what browsers should I support so that my app. is functional for at least 95% of visitors? What are the ways to test those browsers painlessly ?
When talking about HTML5 or CSS3, you should head over to:
When can I use...
As can be seen, we are still far far away from using that.
Also, since old versions of the browsers won't support HTML5 or CSS3, however, you can do what is known as:
Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation
Here are some resources also:
Gallery of HTML5 Sites (You can learn and get the idea from them)
Create modern Web sites using HTML5 and CSS3
Browsers that, collectively, cover 95% of the world: Firefox, Chrome, IE6/7/8.
The best way to test them is to install them on your computer.
You want to use html tags and css compatible with mobile browsers.
For anything CSS3 wrap it in conditional javascript. I always make sure the device width is atleast 240px, then anything below that is the old, crappy, mobile look.
You can use a small mobile boilerplate for CSS, to reset the basic tags you use (make them look them same in different browsers). As with any boilerplate, you should look at the css to see if it's WAY overkill.
For a comprehensive guide check out the W3 Mobile CSS2 guidelines: http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/WD-css-mobile-20001013
Another good resource is this compatibility table: http://www.quirksmode.org/m/css.html
Graceful Degradation is all about making compromises -- if you could do everything in the lower version, you probably would. To pick on the example of rounded corners you cite, it may acceptable to you (or your client) to live without them, where there don't exist renderer specific CSS extensions to support them (this is how http://www.ipswich-angle.com/ handles it, for example, I believe). Other options involving images are there, but it is largely dependant on what compromises you and your client are willing to make.
A service like browsershots.org is quite useful to check how your site renders on different browsers and operating systems. You have to wait in a queue for a while but it's worth doing that.
I was going to make this a comment, but then I got carried away..
w3schools has suggestions for using semantic web elements on your site. It suggests using a Javascript library called html5shiv.js to add styling support to IE8 and below so you can find javascript files which emulate specific functionality built into HTML5 like JSON2.js and Webforms2.js.
Finally this article gives a full example of emulating a HTML5 form with many of the new attributes/functionality.
As for building the site, I'd recommend building a HTML4 site first using semantic elements freely (with html5shiv) and testing with IE7. Then as you build parts of the site that require new features, research a Javascript file that will provide older browsers with the same functionality, e.g: when it's time to add your first rounded corner or gradient maybe add CSS3Pie. Always remember as well that your box-model; border-radius and gradients are supported in webkit as well as mozilla's API so many css3 attributes you'll need to add 3 times:
border-radius: 3px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
Unfortunately I don't have a good resource for how the webkit/mozilla APIs compare with HTML5 functionality.
The only functionality I've struggled to find is support for CSS3 selectors in older browsers, often you can get away with this, I mean if you're not gonna upgrade your browser IMHO you can live with few double-thickness borders or missing alternate row styling in tables.
Maybe one day there will be a site that you can upload your code to that will tell you things like "chrome 20.xyz doesn't support rounded corners, add -webkit-border-radius to add support" but until then adding backwards compatibility after the fact will be near-impossible for complex sites.