I’m about to start a small new project, and I was thinking it’d be a perfect time to start testing HTML5. However, this project must work in IE6 - there’s no negotiation on that.
Here are my brief findings while research HTML5 in general, and if it’s viable for an IE6 world.
Basic HTML5 Introduction Articles
- Robert Nyman’s Into to HTML5
- A List Apart’s Preview of HTML5
- W3C’s HTML5 Intro
- HTML5 Doctor
- Dive Into HTML5
- Zeldman on HTML5
- Zeldman & friends on HTML5
HTML5 & Older Browsers
HTML5 Doctor has a run down of the common display errors and solutions for browsers that don’t properly support HTML5.
For IE specifically, HTML5 introduces several new elements that IE6, IE7 and IE8 do not recognize. Fortunately, the browsers will still render the core objects, but IE doesn’t know how to render CSS on unknown elements. John Resig writes about a JavaScript work around that involves creating a new DOM element of the same name as the ones used in the document. Remy Sharp has a nice little script to handle HTML5 in IE.
A Spec on the Spec
There’s even a spec outlining proper spacing of “HTML5”.
HTML5 Examples
Want to check how HTML5 sites work in the browser of your choice? HTML5 Gallery has a nice listing of HTML5 sites.
Tools
- 52 Framework is an HTML5 framework
- Modernizr checks to see which HTML5 and CSS3 elements are supported in the user’s browser.