HTML 5 and the Markup War
May 29, 2009
Wow… while this is undoubtedly an impressive display of the whizbang things you can do with HTML 5, I have to wonder… what does this mean for us web developers? I already need to scrutinise my CSS and Javascript to make sure it plays nice across all the major browsers, have headaches caused by support for older versions of Internet Explorer (around 25% of visitors to the SimpleGlucose landing page last month use Internet Explorer 6!!!) and now it seems like the Markup War between XHTML / HTML5 and all the big browsers is about to start.
The first thing I found when I clicked the link above using IE7 at work was that my browser didn’t support HTML5.
Sigh.
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June 14, 2010 at 5:21 pm
Hopefully, if it takes off, HTML 5 will unite the browsers to a more uniform standard, the problem of course is that the whole XHTML project was supposed to do exactly that.
To be fair, now the m$ have finally got half decent browser out that does conform to XHTML (with exceptions), they are all approaching a consistency that we haven’t enjoyed before (only took them 6 years).
The biggest problem XHTML had was that it would still render in older browsers like IE6 (even if not very well) and because of that, browsers like IE6 still remained a viable browsing option and a whopping 12% of internet users are/were still using it.
This means/meant we as developers still need to be sure we can cater for 10 year old browsers. If HTML5 can be a platform that officially puts these old browsers to bed and forces users to upgrade. We may just be in with a chance of getting a consistent standard.
June 21, 2010 at 7:01 pm
I hope so – it can be so frustrating as a web developer to have to pander to so many different standards. I do think Microsoft are making great strides finally in this area which will help. I hear great things about IE9, but I am not brave enough to install the test version on my machine. Yet.