HTML 5, what should I tell my clients?

Question

More of my clients lately are asking me about HTML 5 and I'm trying to get a sense of what to tell them. How long until all the major browsers have standard support for it? How long until I leave HTML 4 behind and only code new projects in HTML 5? What are you telling your clients?

Answer 1

Are they asking about specific HTML5 features or HTML5 in general? At my company we haven't said anything to the clients, but we do set the HTML5 doctype as well as using some HTML5 markup - but only markup that works in non-HTML5 compliant browsers. HTML5 doesn't necessary mean you discard older browsers, it depends on which features you implement. You can still use audio and video tags, as long as you keep a flash fallback - as an example. HTML5 form tags are poorly implemented even in bleeding edge browsers, so using them are not an option.

I suggest you read Dive Into HTML5 to see how you can work with HTML5 today, but still support non-HTML5 browsers.

I'll throw in another link; Modernizr is a JavaScript library that come in handy if you want use bleeding edge HTML5 or CSS3 features, it detects support for HTML5 tags and some (all?) CSS3 properties.