If you have a website, and who doesn’t nowadays, you fit in one of three categories:
1) You use a hosted service that does all the behind-the-scenes technical stuff for you.
2) You pay someone else to take care of it.
3) You or an in-house team handles it.
You may also know that HTML5 is the new thing for websites. If you’re in the first two categories, that’s really all you need to know. If you’re in the third category you should track this carefully.
Web browsers handle HTML5 with varying degrees of effectiveness. Therefore, just because a new feature is part of HTML5, it’s unwise to use it before the browsers can actually handle it.
To find what each browser offers, check out html5test.com. It tells which HTML5 features work for your browser and provides a compliance score, based on a 500-point scale. The results are eye opening:
Chrome 22 leads the pack with 437 points
Safari 6: 376 points
Firefox 15: 346 points
Internet Explorer v9: 138 points
Older versions have lower scores and therefore lower levels of HTML5 compatibility.
The key point is, don’t implement a new HTML5 feature until all the major browsers support it and most users have switched to that version.
Why is an HTML5 post on a blog about publishing? Quite simply because “publishers are becoming developers.” And that’s another thing for us to contemplate.