Assessing HTML5 and CSS3

Are HTML5 and CSS3 ready to use? The simple answer is yes—as long as you know what you’re doing.

The editor of the HTML5 specification, Ian Hickson, provoked an uproar in 2008, when he estimated that it would take until 2022 for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to adopt the specification as a proposed recommendation (http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=718). This was widely misinterpreted as meaning that HTML5 wouldn’t be ready for use before then. In fact, he was actually referring to the W3C’s stringent requirements for approval. To qualify, the specification must pass tens of thousands of test cases, and at least two browsers must implement every feature completely. In February 2011, the W3C announced it was speeding up the process and set 2014 as the target for formally approving the HTML5 specification. But you don’t need to wait until then. Many aspects of HTML5 are widely supported, even by the browser everyone loves to hate, Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) as far back as IE 6.