Are there compelling reasons to adopt HTML5?

Question

The main website for my company is due to be completely overhauled next year as part of a major rebranding exercise. While it is expected to only require a "new lick of paint" (i.e. update CSS and imagery), it may also be the best time to look at moves towards a shift to HTML5.

There are plenty of reasons why I would not want to do this, including:

• Not widely implemented in many currently-used browsers (I'm looking at you, IE!)
• Adds to an already-large workload
• Carries a degree of risk around possibly-uncertain implementations of the HTML5 draft

I find that it's always easy to find reasons against doing something. I'm interested in looking at any strong reasons why I might want to push for this.

Can you suggest what advantages I would likely find in adopting HTML5 across our commercial site or whether it's just too soon to be doing this on any but the most bleeding-edge sites?

Answer 1

It depends on what your site offers, such as, if you already are using MathML or SVG then it will have reasons than if you just serve static pages only.

Once the spec is done it will still be 10 years or so before it is the norm on the web, so you will have to either

a) Support HTML5 and HTML4 for a decade

b) Just keep with HTML4 until everyone else has switched.

If you are going to go with (a) then you might as well factor in moving it in as you can.

So, write your webpages for HTML4 first. Get it functioning that way.

Then, look at the features in HTML5 that would be useful to integrate, and though it may mean that some browsers will have a better user-experience, you can add in the features you deem useful.

There are many that can be useful, such as WebWorkers, if you do many ajax calls at the same time, since that will give you real threading, as opposed to using setTimeout.

The canvas tag can be very useful, if you need a way to have a drawable 2D surface that can react to dom events.

For the changes though, without knowing what your website is like it is hard to give a strong argument one way or another, or your level of comfort with supporting 2 different markups.

Answer 2

Unless you specifically need some of the new things that HTML5 brings there is really no reason to migrate. As you already stated, HTML5 is not completely implemented in browsers and you can expect that a majority of internet users has not upgraded to a browser that even understands HTML5. The best thing to do at this point is to wait it out when you make this change to the website and the next time a redesign is being done HTML5 will probably be mainstream.

If you think about it, even with something as simple as the new video tag that HTML5 has, you would be forced to gracefully display a Flash version if the browser is not HTML5 compliant. This is one of those situations where it's better not to be using the latest and greatest, yet.

Answer 3

‘Adopting’ HTML5? That's not really the way it works.

HTML5 is a set of extensions to markup and script. Some have been spun off into standalone specs. Some have incipient browser support. Some will change or be dropped as the effort moves on. There is not a monolithic HTML5 for you to adopt today or in the near future.

Instead, you can start using the extensions you want and that have browser support. That doesn't require you to change anything else about your web site; there is nothing there that requires completely new code, that would “add to an already-large workload”.

Most of the implemented stuff today is script extensions you can sniff for before trying to use. There are a few tags you might possibly want to use outside of a scripting context, so you can switch DOCTYPEs to HTML5's one if you want. But it doesn't really get you anything yet.

[X]HTML5 is not a fresh start. It adds, not changes.