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Start Implementing HTML5 Today

html5doctor.com

51 pointslaktek11 comments

This just links to the root of the blog for some reason. The article is here:

http://html5doctor.com/how-to-get-html5-working-in-ie-and-fi...

I'm not sure if it's possible to change the URL now, but if so, it would be a good idea. The article is the first item in the blog now, but that will of course change quickly.

I think this is b/c the site just launched a few hours ago and they're referring to it in its entirety, not just this article:

http://twitter.com/rem/status/2386349309

So how do you launch and in a few hours get this huge traffic like he's doing?

That's a trick I'd like to learn.

I can see the point of using the video tag, because you can achieve better compatibility (iPhone!) and a smother experience (no Flash player crashes with native video support). But I don't see the real benefit of using the tags that only provide more "semantic" value, like section, header, aside, nav, etc. The code clarity you get from it offset by the cludges described in the article that you have to use to ensure compatibility (FF2, IE6 and 7, etc).

As far as I can tell only one "cludge" for all of IE (one JS file). I really couldn't care less about FF2.

View source here -- http://2009.full-frontal.org/ -- then visit it in IE. Works great.

DIVs weren't meant to be the only way to style w/o tables. For a front-end guy like me, this is pretty cool.

(Also, more about the "HTML shiv" approach they're using is here: http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-shiv/)

Semantic HTML5 elements are necessary for accessibility and machine-parsing of your content, which increases findability.

What this means pragmatically:

Screen readers will be able to more intelligently interact with a website. Navigation, for example, could only be read out loud when the user requests it instead of every time a page loads.

Search engines, when parsing your page, will be able to more easily get a general idea of what the page is about. Right now we can only tell headers, paragraphs, and lists; with HTML5 parsers will be able to not only determine the former, but also which content is more important.

The more semantic the markup, the more a machine-parser can figure out about the meaning behind a page.

It's the same argument as a mass of divs and spans (or tables!) versus h1s, paragraphs, and dls.

Ultimately, not only does it add context to your content, but it makes it easier and more concise to produce the markup: you don't need <div class="aside"></div> anymore - you just need <aside></aside>.

You know those sites that have top-ten stuff, or lists of images or sections of content that sometimes we just want to go one after the other without having to scroll exactly to the next one? (smashing magazine comes to mind)

Well, wouldn't it be good if modern browsers could skip to the next section with the press of the spacebar instead of having to scroll manually?

Like adding an attribute to the new <section scroll="stop|flow"> tag in html5

Thereby breaking the current behavior of the spacebar, which is to scroll one window-height? No, thank you, I use that all over the place.

Thanks to frames, javascript, etc., space bar is already broken. The last browser I remember where space bar consistently worked right was Netscape 1.

I'm not saying this particular feature should or shouldn't be added, but "right here" seems a strange place to draw the line. I can see either (a) don't let webpage authors muck with it at all, or (b) give them enough control to make it do something intelligent. What we've got now is enough control to screw it up for the user, but not the right abstractions to do what authors really want anyway.

As long as focus is on the window, I've had few problems with the spacebar-to-page-down behavior in Firefox 3 or Safari 3. When it does break, I do notice, because that's my default paging mechanism, so I think it works way more often than not, even now.

scroll="flow" would be the default, and for backwards compatibility.

Wherever page designers want to put a section stop AND ONLY THEN they use scroll="stop" so users enjoy a better surfing experience, like I described earlier: going pic by pic, topic by topic or section by section.

Don't like the spacebar? use any other mechanism. I am pointing a users need worth being considered.

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