Large eCommerce site: Is it time for HTML5?

I currently work for a large company and I design for their high-traffic ecommerce开发者_Go百科 website. We support tens-of-thousands of users across a variety of browsers. Our current browser stats point to most people using either Firefox 3+ and IE8. There are about 5% of users still on IE6.

Is it time to start coding for the future and impliment HTML5 across the site? Is it a responsible thing to do or should I wait a year for people to upgrade to better supporting browsers?

Thank you.

HTML5 isn't one specific thing. You can start using it even in browsers that have no idea what HTML5 is. If you just start using some of the extra tags or form types, they degrade perfectly into standard elements in older browsers. Video needs a Flash fallback anyway. The advanced scripting features all need fallbacks for non-supporting browsers anyway, or must only add non-essential functionality.

In short, sure, start using HTML5 techniques now to provide advantages for cutting-edge browsers, just make sure it all degrades nicely in older browsers.

IE8 doesnt support most of HTML5. There are libraries you can use to make it more HTML5 aware; but for a large production site I think your better of waiting a year.

I would say that the 5% of users still on IE6 will probably remain on IE6. They either aren't interested in upgrading (perhaps they don't know about these things), or are restricted to IE6 by security policies in their workplace. In particular I've found that a number of our clients are not upgrading from IE6 because their IT teams consider it to be too big a change, or their existing software is not compatible with anything else.

Therefore, my advice is: go HTML5. With a bit of work you can work around IE6's deficiencies (look at Modernizr, CSS3PIE for ideas). And that way, the other 95% of customers get a better experience.

... what is "large"? Considering HTML5 is still considered work in progress, I'd vote no.

The name "HTML5" is tending to be used by most people at the moment to describe all the exciting new features in web browsers. Not all of these features are actually part of the HTML5 spec - for example, CSS and Javascript have new features which are being referred to under the HTML5 banner. I'm going to assume you mean all these features.

My answer would be to investigate which features you can implement, but remain backward-compatible. Many of the features of HTML5, CSS3, etc can be added to your site without making it un-usable for older browsers.

Some examples: (but do spend time researching for more)

• New input types, such as <input type='date'> and <input type='number'>
  These give you new features in a modern browser, but old browsers will still show a normal input field.
  More info: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201004/html5_input_types/

• Semantic HTML5 tags, such as <section>, <footer>, etc.
  These give you additional semantic meaning to your HTML tags, which is good for SEO and other automated systems that look at your site. They are broadly backward-compatible, though in order to support them in IE6/7/8, you will need to include an IE hack such as HTML5Shiv. However, I would suggest using Modernizr, which includes the HTML5Shiv plus a stack of other useful functionality.

• Some CSS3 features such as border-radius. IE doesn't know about this, but the result is that IE will have square corners and other browsers will have rounded corners. So nothing that breaks the site for IE users.
  But if you really want to, IE can be made to support a number of CSS3 features, including border-radius, using tools such as CSS3Pie.

• Instead of using SVG graphics directly, use a Javascript graphics library such as Raphael, which will draw SVG in browsers that support it, and fall back to VML for IE (which will even work in IE6).

Obviously stuff like the <video> or <canvas> tags aren't going to work in older browsers, but frankly, it'll take you long enough just implementing the features you can use straight away; by the time you're ready to take a step further, things will have moved on anyway.