Posts from Thursday, April 14th, 2011

My Own Private HTML5 Survey

Published 12 years, 11 months past

Yesterday, Brandy Fortune asked me on Twitter if there are “any major sites written in HTML 5 now“.  I decided to throw the question to my Twitter gang, and was of course immediately deluged in answers.  Also a small helping of standards politics, which  wasn’t really what I was after but probably should have known was inevitable.  Le sigh.

Anyway, here’s a sampling of the sites most frequently mentioned and how they’re using HTML5, listed in no particular order.

Using new-to-HTML5 markup (and DOCTYPE)

Using HTML5 DOCTYPE but no apparent new-to-HTML5 markup

And then there’s Facebook.  Rumor has it they’re using HTML5 features like the History API while still bearing an XHTML DOCTYPE.  I was also told they use video but all the videos I saw were Flash-based.  It’s possible that more is going on — who knows, maybe Farmville is all HTML5 now — but I was only willing to put up with the user experience for so long.

Some notes:

  • I didn’t run a spider script to verify which HTML5 elements, if any, were being used on a site.  Instead I surfed around using a user stylesheet that highlights HTML5 elements and looked for dashed red outlines.  If they were there, the site got “uses HTML5 markup”.  If I didn’t see any, then “no apparent HTML5 markup”.  This may mean I miscategorized a site or two, in which case sorry.  Even if not, these lists won’t stay current for more than a couple of weeks, so regard this as a single snapshot in time, not the whole movie.
  • In my limited and purely anecdotal peerings, far and away the most commonly-used HTML5 element was sectionnav appeared to run a distant second.
  • Any site that uses font replacement is using HTML5: canvas.  I didn’t list such sites, so bear that in mind.  (Sorry, Beano.)  I just hope such sites change their DOCTYPEs to match.
  • I did not list any site that lacked a DOCTYPE.  I don’t care if the HTML5 DOCTYPE is optional, that doesn’t mean any DOCTYPE-less page is using HTML5.  Or, if it does, my next step is to write a MeyerHTML DTD with an optional DOCTYPE and then charge you all $1 per site for using invalid markup in violation of the terms of the DTD’s license.  And then I’m buying an island.  Oahu seems nice.

Comments are switched off for once partly because I don’t really want another faceful of politics right now, and partly because attempts to post links to other HTML5 sites will end up in the spam trap and frustrate posters.  Feel free to go nuts on your own sites, of course.


Browse the Archive