Big ecommerce site: is it time for HTML5?

Question

I currently work for a large company and I am developing them for a high-traffic e-commerce website. We support tens of thousands of users in various browsers. Our current browser statistics point to most people using Firefox 3+ and IE8. In IE6 there are about 5% more users.

Is it time to start coding the future and embed HTML5 through the site? Is this a responsible task, or should I wait a year when people can switch to improved browsers?

Thanks.

Answer 1

HTML5 is not one specific thing. You can start using it even in browsers that have no idea what HTML5 is. If you are just starting to use some additional tags or form types, they are perfectly divided into standard elements in older browsers. In any case, the video requires a flash backup. For advanced scripting capabilities, backups for non-supporting browsers are still needed, or they should only add non-essential features.

In short, of course, start using HTML5 methods to provide benefits for the most modern browsers, just make sure that all this beautifully gets worse in older browsers.

Answer 2

IE8 does not support most of HTML5. There are libraries that you can use to make it more accessible for HTML5; but for a large production site, I think you better wait a year.

Answer 3

I would say that 5% of users still on IE6 are likely to stay on IE6. They are either not interested in modernization (perhaps they are not aware of these things), or are limited by IE6 workplace security policies. In particular, I found that a number of our customers are not updating with IE6 because their IT teams believe that these are too big changes, or their existing software is not compatible with anything else.

Therefore, my advice: go HTML5. With a little work, you can get around IE6's flaws (look at Modernizr, CSS3PIE for ideas). And thus, the other 95% of customers get the best experience.

Answer 4

... what is "big"? Given that HTML5 is still considered incomplete, I would not vote.

Answer 5

The name "HTML5" is typically used by most people at the moment to describe all the exciting new features in web browsers. Not all of these features are actually part of the HTML5 specification, for example, CSS and Javascript have new features that are mentioned under the HTML5 banner. I'm going to assume that you mean all these functions.

My answer will be to figure out what features you can implement, but stay backward compatible. Many of the features of HTML5, CSS3, etc. They can be added to your site without making it unsuitable for older browsers.

Some examples: (but spend more time researching)

• New input types such as <input type='date'> and <input type='number'>
  They give you new features in a modern browser, but older browsers will still display a normal input field. Additional information: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201004/html5_input_types/

• HTML5 semantic tags such as <section> , <footer> , etc.
  This gives you extra meaning for your HTML tags, which is good for SEO and other automated systems that look at your site. They are generally backward compatible, although you need to enable an IE hack such as HTML5Shiv to support them in IE6 / 7/8. However, I would suggest using Modernizr , which includes HTML5Shiv plus a stack of other useful features.

• Some CSS3 features, such as border-radius . IE is not aware of this, but as a result, IE will have square corners, and other browsers will have rounded corners. Thus, nothing that breaks the site for IE users.
  But if you really want it, IE can be created to support a number of CSS3 features, including border-radius , using tools like CSS3Pie .

• Instead of directly using SVG graphics, use a Javascript graphics library such as Raphael , which will draw SVG in browsers to support it and return to VML for IE (which will even work in IE6).

Obviously, things like the <video> or <canvas> tags will not work in older browsers, but to be honest, you will need a lot of time just by using functions that you can use right now; by the time you are ready to take another step, it will still move anyway.