garvinhicking wrote:What's the current status on HTML5? Are there central issues with older browsers? Ideally I'd like the template to show up in IE6, even though not all functionality or looks would need to be perfect here.
If there's not much that breaks in "HTML5-only" mode, I'd like to only offer that.
Okay. That's a huge topic I didn't think we'd have to discuss again, but here goes.
What
is HTML5? It's a new doctype plus a bunch of new elements and some minor things like being able to omit the type attribute on script elements. Most of these things work in any browser. Basically the only issues are the new elements (like header, footer etc.) because older browsers don't know these, meaning they don't have any default styles for them. That's easy to solve – just add default styles to CSS, done. 2k11 does have those styles. It won't be an issue in any of the modern browsers – Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, iOS, Android (basically anything which is updated regularly be the people using it).
Now, IE<9 is a different thing. It needs JS assistance. Basically, we have to "register" the new elements using the
http://code.google.com/p/html5shiv/ – 2k11 does have it (via Modernizr). So in an IE<9 with JS disabled, this
will break. There's no (sane) way around it. Boohoo.
(In fact, one
could avoid JS by not using any HTML5 elements, but then one could stick with XHTML or HTML4 in the first place. I hope no one is seriously considering this an option. I don't. It's 2011, if you're using an old IE
and disable JS, please leave the web.)
There are some HTML5 elements which will never work in these browsers unless one uses so-called polyfills to emulate them, i.e. audio/video. Polyfills, to cut it short, are JS fallbacks. So again, no JS, no fun.
Our third component is CSS. 2k11 uses some (layout) techniques which probably won't work in IE6. This means it will probably not be rendered correctly, but it's content may be still accessible. I really don't know because I have no IE6 on any of my machines, and I don't plan on installing one.
There are 2 alternative "solutions" for this. IE6 users can be prompted to install Chrome frame, which will "import" the Chrome rendering engine into IE6 (voodoo!), but I don't think many IE6 users would actually do that. Or IE6 users could be served a purely
typographical stylesheet. That means no layout, no colors – no styling, but accessible content.
Let me be blunt: I will
not make
any effort to make this work in IE6. At all. Ever.
If it works by chance, fine. If it doesn't, I don't care. If this is a reason not to consider 2k11 as a new default, so be it. I also think if we
don't switch s9y (and by that I mean core, plugins and default template) to HTML5 in the near future, it doesn't
have much of a future.
Google has dropped IE6 support. Drupal has dropped IE6 support. Hell, even
Microsoft is dropping IE6 support:
http://www.ie6countdown.com/ (Yes, that's a site
by MS.)
YL