So, I've been working on an art project for the past week - I painted a picture of the native growth area in our backyard, and then converted it into a WordPress template for my personal blog.
I spent a lot of time on the template, and I was planning to do the whole thing in HTML 5. On Tuesday night I realized that while this is for my personal blog, and so normally I wouldn't care if IE users couldn't view it correctly, if I'm going to turn in the template as my final project I need to find out what browser they use at school.
Internet Explorer 7, of course. (At least it's not IE 6...). And the IT department tried to tell me that my page should be "compatible with IE 6 and 5". Hahahahahahah! That is not going to happen. I opened it in IE 6 to make sure it displays, but I honestly don't care an iota if it works in IE 5 or not. (This is my personal blog, the audience is me and possibly my friends if they use Safari or Firefox.)
After fighting with the template for a while, I realized that while IE 7 was correctly ignoring the HTML tags it didn't recognize, it was also ignoring the styles that I'd placed on them. Now, this shouldn't be a surprise, but with the project due on Friday at noon (today), I decided that passing the class was the better part of valor and rewrote the whole template in XHTML 1.0 transitional.
What's This Got to Do with HTML 5?
What's interesting is that Apple released a new HTML 5 Showcase today that shows off the many interesting things you can do with HTML 5.
But...
They've set up the site with a pop-up message for any browser except Safari. Even viewing it in Firefox (some HTML 5 support) and Opera (a lot of HTML 5 support), you get the message:
You'll need to download Safari to view this demo
Is Apple trying to restart the browser wars?
Unfortunately, while I love the idea of HTML 5, until IE 9 comes out and is widely adopted, HTML 5 isn't going to catch on with a lot of Web designers. And I don't think that pretty page is going to get people to download Safari, no matter how enticing the images look.
HTML 5 Makes Me Say "Hmmmmm" originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Friday, June 4th, 2010 at 14:26:47.
Permalink | Comment | Email this
