Comments on: Backwards compatibility and HTML 5

By: westonruter

westonruter — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:49:49 +0000

@zachleat, If they’re on a mobile device, they won’t be using IE7, so that shim won’t be necessary (at least that one). If they’re on IE7 with JavaScript disabled, then they’re out of luck, and should switch to Firefox, Safari, or Chrome ;-)

By: zachleat

zachleat — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 23:25:42 +0000

And what happens when your visitor has JavaScript disabled or is on a mobile device without JavaScript?

By: westonruter

westonruter — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:56:30 +0000

@Amenthes, because we have inline SVG and, more importantly, HTML5 block elements are parsed correctly in Firefox 2 when in XHTML mode. See FF2 bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311366

By: Amenthes

Amenthes — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:38:05 +0000

@westonruter, why did you choose XHTML5 over HTML5?

By: oopstudios

oopstudios — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:15:27 +0000

I say go for the new tags and sod IE6! Consider if all webdevelopers deployed the newest of technologies, it would help force along the development and stability of browsers… Git er done!

By: westonruter

westonruter — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:59:34 +0000

Dion, Your suggestion to "convert the new tags to divs" at runtime for browsers that don't support them is exactly what we've done at Shepherd Interactive so that we can serve XHTML5 on our company website. We've made an XHTML5 Support WordPress plugin which does exactly this. It adds a JavaScript shim to the HEAD for IE7, but for IE6 it replaces all HTML5 elements with DIVs, so that: SECTION becomes DIV.html5-section ARTICLE becomes DIV.html5-article Additional CSS rules, of course, can then be included to style these classified DIVs for IE6.