Do you really need to know HTML5?... No, you don't.

Maybe I’m a bit “old school” but all these new technologies are starting to drive me a bit nuts. Do you need to know html5? In my opinion, absolutely not! I keep finding awesome things that I would love to do with websites only to find that I can’t do them because it only works with html5. This is not to say that I’m unable to implement them, but to create a functional website that works for businesses, you do not need to know html5.

What is HTML5?

HTML5 is the upgrade to what we know as html today. We code in div tags and as such we label our html as follows:


<div id="header">
  <div id="navigation"></div>
</div>
<div id="bodycontent">
  <div id="sidebar"></div>
</div>
<div id="footer"></div>

So what the semantic police don’t like about this is that we use too much of the “div” tag. Let’s take a look at the html5 alternative:


<body>
<!-- Define Header -->
<header>
</header>
<!-- End Header -->
<!-- Define Navigation/Menu -->
<nav>
</nav>
<!-- End Navigation -->
<!-- Main content area -->
<section>
</section>
<!-- End of Main content area -->
<!-- Sidebar -->
<aside>
<section></section>
</aside>
<!-- End Sidebar -->
<!-- Footer -->
<footer>
<section></section>
</footer>
<!-- End of Footer -->

Thank you to designzzz for being the only sensible website to post a basic html 5 markup example!

So what’s wrong with the html5 markup?

The first most important thing that you need to know that is wrong with HTML5 markup is as follows: IT DOESN’T WORK ON MOST BROWSERS!!!! Check out Google and research some HTML5 mark up. Most examples that you find will have a JavaScript file (http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js) that needs to be attached for it to work. And most of the time, it doesn’t.

Look at every awesome and cool html5/css3 script. Here’s one for example FlexBox. This is probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen and wanted to use… doesn’t work.

Practical use of HTML5 and CSS3 is very far off yet the community continues to move at a staggering rate. I love it, but at the same time, I can’t help but get upset because all of these amazing and awesome things that I would love to use, I can’t.

To build a practical website for a client that’s fully functioning and cross-browser compatible, I don’t think you’ll ever need to know html5 (unless your building cool mobile sites, then yes, you need to know html5).