Beyond HTML5 and CSS3

Well, it seems I’m a little late to the party – Remy Sharp has beaten me to the punch and posted a great post explaining the sudden popularity of polyfills. You should read that too.

Over the last few days, people have been talking about “polyfills.” According to Paul Irish, a polyfill is

A shim that mimics a future API providing fallback functionality to older browsers.

Throughout the book, we discuss many different polyfills, even creating our own at times. As more developers implement more of the interesting HTML5 and CSS3 features, more interesting polyfills are emerging.

One of the most well-known polyfills is Remy Sharp’s html5shim which lets us use the new sectional markup in our pages in browsers like IE 8 and earlier. Others like Socket.IO go beyond simple polyfills and provide both server and client-side fallbacks for Web Sockets.

The Modernizr wiki has a huge list of various shims and polyfills you can use in your work.

Creating usable fallback solutions is the only way we can use these new APIs and features on our sites today. HTML5 and CSS3 provides a fallback solution for almost every topic covered.

The <code>section</code> and <code>article</code> elements are two new elements we can use to more clearly define our content when we use HTML5. There’s a lot of confusion about how these should be used, so let’s try to clear it up.

Sections are logical regions. A newspaper may have a “Sports” section. That sports section may, in turn, have many subsections, like the socres page, a section for football, hockey, baseball, and even another section for local sports. Sections can be nested within other sections, and that’s how you use them in HTML5 too.

The sports section also has many articles. Articles contain syndicatable content that can stand on its own. That’s the key phrase though – the article <em>must be able to stand on its own.</em>.

So sections are really logical separations, whereas articles describe real content. It gets a little more complicated because articles themselves can be divided up into sections too.

If you’re interested in working with HTML5 in your ASP.Net MVC applications, you should have a look at this toolkit which makes it easy to implement some of the new HTML5 form features into your applications.

http://www.deanhume.com/Home/BlogPost/asp-net-mvc-html5-toolkit/29

HTML5 and CSS3 are the future of web development, but you don’t have to wait to start using them. Even though the specification is still in development, many modern browsers and mobile devices already support HTML5 and CSS3. This book gets you up to speed on the new HTML5 elements and CSS3 features you can use right now, and backwards compatible solutions ensure that you don’t leave users of older browsers behind.

Buy the beta copy now and contribute to making the final version even better.

Youtube’s recent blog post states why they’re sticking with Flash Player as their primary player for the foreseeable future. The main reasons basically boil down to HTML5 video’s immaturity — the inability to do streaming video, poor fullscreen support, and no way to protect the rights of content producers.

Read more here.