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I'm having a little confusion with understanding HTML5. I understand that it's not one thing. It's a bunch of things. Semantics, storage, media, effects and more, but how should I go about building my "basic websites" that won't really touch any of this. The only difference I can think of that I will use is different semantics. Do I need to provide some kind of backwards compatibility for older browsers? Example: <!DOCTYPE html> is the doctype tag for html 5 webpages, but will older browsers have a hard time displaying my website?

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5 Answers 5

The DOCTYPE is fine. It was carefully chosen to be backward compatible.

If you don't need the new features of HTML5, just don't use them.

For each new HTML5 feature that you do want to use, you will have to establish what the browser support is like for that feature. (This was true of HTML4 too, but by now what works in that is pretty stable and widely known.) caniuse.com is a good resource for that. Where a feature is not universally supported yet, you will need to establish whether a workaround or shim is available, what the downsides of using those are (e.g. requires JavaScript) and whether their usage is acceptable to your users.

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The vast majority of the HTML and attributes in HTML5 is backwards compatible with anything you are doing now. Using the new doctype (notice nothing in it says HTML5) will keep even older versions of IE in standards mode going back to IE6. There is no reason not to be using the basic HTML elements right now knowing they will work the same as you see them now.

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While there are some browsers that don't support HTML5, a lot of them do now and I think it's important to learn some HTML5 because that is the direction the world is heading. If you don't need HTML5, you don't have to use them and simply including the <!DOCTYPE html> at the top doesn't force you to do anything, it just gives you those privileges.

I highly recommend watching this video of a lecture at Stanford because the professor kind of gives a little talk about HTML5 in general. While he does work towards speaking about the mobile potential of it, he basically brings you up to speed with how HTML5 came about, etc, some other technologies, etc.

The video is kind of long so if you want to skip to the HTML5, just skip to 26:20

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Most likely IE will have some troubles (especially the old IE), but there are many work around available online

This previous question does have some good pointers

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I suggest to begin with templates like HTML5 Boilerplate that will take care of a lot of backward compatibilities as far as support for newer HTML5 Elements in older browsers.

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