CSS3 and HTML5, ok to use yet?

mattgaunt

mattgaunt

mattgaunt

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441
Heya everyone,

I'm looking at re-designing my website and I'm not convinced CSS3 is ready to be used (things like rounded corners), am I just being a bit stuck in my ways with ensuring perfect validation with html and css?

I'm not bothered about IE as I'm intending on just bringing up a message encouraging visitors to change browsers (most visitors use some other browser anyway).

Basically I just wanted to get some other opinions who have a better understanding of it all.

Cheers,
Matt
 
With things like rounded corners, if someone's using IE6 is it really the end of the world if they get a square box instead? Consider even displaying a div at the top for IE6 visitors telling them to upgrade their browser.
 
If you don't care about IE then I don't see why not.

CSS3 won't be 100% consistent across all browsers, but you can achieve a lot with it if you experiment. You can also take a look at Modernizr which can help out older browsers if you did want to support IE and get a consistent look.

HTML5 can definitely be used today (Google.com is technically a HTML5 page) it just depends what features of it you'd like to use the most. Again with IE you'll have to help it along with a bit of JavaScript if you want to achieve a consistent look. http://code.google.com/p/html5shiv/
 
Cuchulain said:
Baby jesus weeps every time an incompetent designer/developer tries to exclude market share browsers.
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I don't bother catering for the IE6 brigade. Its free and easy to upgrade. Theres also many other browser alternatives too.

I develop to cover the mainstream. I don't consider IE6 to be mainstream. Call it a niche market if you wish.
 
To be honest if you're designing and developing it all on your own for yourself then i doubt it will be a site where you need to take into consideration stuff like IE6 and people who turn of javascript which are just annoyances. But if its a larger organisation and you're making it for a company they probably won't want you excluding market share by jumping on the DIE IE6 bandwagon.
 
Its no good holding on to the past, thats why its lingering. Things evolve and its a fact of life that things move on over time. Thats why IE6 is still here because we're feeding the people who find it hard to let go.

Some of the big blue chip companies have started to ignore IE6 now and realise that to be more modern/cutting edge then they need to look forward, not backwards.
 
IMO, sites should be usable in IE6, but you shouldn't waste any time correcting visual defects unless you want to. If you're on IE6, you're used to things looking rubbish.
 
Cuchulain said:
Baby jesus weeps every time an incompetent designer/developer tries to exclude market share browsers.
Click to expand...

I couldn't disagree more.

IE6 is old, buggy and inherently insecure compared to pretty much any modern browser - it's actually in the user's best interest to dump it ASAP. Unfortunately, the majority of people don't understand the reasons why they should upgrade, so they don't - as long as pages work in IE6 then they're perfectly happy to keep using it; the only way to drive them away from IE6 is to stop supporting it.

If you're going to call any developer incompetent, then direct it at the ones who specifically design sites and web apps to only work in IE6 and consider no other browsers at all. We are stuck with IE6 at work because the major apps we use only work with it.
 
kkbigal said:
I couldn't disagree more. [...]
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To be fair to Cuchulain, neither he* nor the OP mentioned IE6 specifically; the thread appears to have developed that way from the mighty fini's casual mention of it.

In fact, it's entirely possible, given the mentions of CSS3 and HTML5, that Matt might have meant newer IE versions too, given that even they don't have very good support for either. In which case, ol' Cuchy** has a bit more of a point - it's probably too much of a market share to disregard all IE users, even for a personal site. Though as mr.sly points out, it shouldn't make much difference to the content.

On the topic of finally dismissing IE6, it's worth noting that while US and European use has mercifully dwindled to roughly 5% - and therefore, in my opinion, at the threshold of serving a Universal stylesheet - the Asian and African regions show that up to 45% of users are still on IE6. Clearly, leaving behind IE6 if your target audience is in those regions is a tad silly.


* Probability for the win
** Perturbing overfamiliarity for the win
 
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Cuchulain said:
Baby jesus weeps every time an incompetent designer/developer tries to exclude market share browsers.
Click to expand...

Well two of the largest sites/companies on the internet don't support IE6, that's Google/Youtube. If they get millions of hits a day and don't support a certain browser, why should we? People will continue to use crappy browsers unless we stop catering for them.

http://www.bringdownie6.com
 
It all depends on your target audience. If your audience are government officials or large companies you may find that they still use IE6 as their IT team may not have yet, or want to, upgrade to IE7+.

At work we have to consider IE6 whenever we build/design websites, however, for my own personal work I do what is nice and have a basic fallback for IE6.
 
It's not hard to make a site usable in IE6, just as it isn't hard to make them usable in a Screenreader or Lynx. If the site doesn't work in those then you are doing it wrong.
 
With regards to IE6, a post on a popular mailing list by a developer for Tesco suggests, in the UK shopping population at least, IE6 is still used by nearly 15% of visitors. Since it's a supermarket which in theory should have a pretty broad market reach, I'd say that economically IE6 is still too popular to ignore. Considering default Windows Update settings, people still using IE6 are either forced to or just don't know how to upgrade so pop-up notifications will largely fall on deaf ears.

Nothing wrong with HTML 4 Strict and CSS2.
 
without bothering with IE6 you could always serve up a specific stylesheet. HTML 5 support is needed if you want iPod/iPad/iPhone visitors to see video really rather than using youtube or something else, but you can use fallback methods anyway for that. rounded corners seem to be used in many site designs, if they are square I'm sure the IE users never notice?!!?! Or the other alternative is to use something like jquery script(s) which will degrade nicely if you want to go down that route.

Personally I use CSS3 selectors but double check that IE6/7/8 users get an ok experience, and although Tescos reckon 15% use IE6 my own figures across approx 100 sites are more like 8% and dropping at about 1% a month.
 
3dcandy said:
although Tescos reckon 15% use IE6 my own figures across approx 100 sites are more like 8% and dropping at about 1% a month.
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Would you care to share more about the demographics of those figures? Even if you're in a more confined market, depending on how many unique visitors use your services, 8% is still a considerable amount of people.

I agree about using a separate stylesheet for IE6. It's easier to maintain and just as easy to pull when figures really do show nobody uses it anymore.
 
Last months visitors to our company site indicate around 16% market share for IE6 still, like it or not that's a huge amount of people and in line with Tesco's figures.
 
8% could be seen as a large market. I'm lucky that I have spoken to most of the visitors using IE6 and they actually don't understand/know any better. They are also about 70 years old!

As of today, due to an increase in visitors, IE5 has 20%, IE6 has 20% and I'm pulling my hair out at the emails I'm getting due to people with no technical understanding wondering why the site doesn't look very good....
 
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