RE: [docbook-apps] Re: html 5, as a target

[<rob.cavicchio@emc.com>]

Larry Garfield [mailto:larry@garfieldtech.com] wrote:

> That varies widely depending on your market.  The main site I use DocBook
> for
> is 50% Firefox users and less than 2% IE 6; A few months ago I officially
> announced that our software doesn't care about IE 6 any more, and I'm not
> really going to bother with IE 7, either.  That user base is using almost
> entirely modern browsers.
> 
> Meanwhile, South Korea is stuck on IE 6 because of all the IE 6-specific
> ActiveX in government and banking web sites.  It varies super widely, even
> though Microsoft would love for IE 6 to die, too.  We're talking about a
> decade-old browser. :-)
> 
> You make a valid point that many HTML 5 features are not well supported by
> the
> existing install base... yet.  There's a chicken and egg question there as
> there always is with a new technology.


Microsoft support for Windows XP (which includes IE 6) isn't scheduled to fully expire until 2014, so I'd say it's a pretty safe bet that there will be some people running IE 6 at least until then--and probably well beyond. I say "isn't scheduled" to expire because it wasn't long ago that Microsoft extended support for Windows 98 by a couple of years due to the outcry from corporations still using it.

The HTML5 specification isn't scheduled to become a recommendation until 2022.

So HTML5 as a replacement for the current HTML output types certainly does not appear to be a viable option for quite some time to come. But assuming no major upsets, it *will* come. The only question is when it will become real enough that it makes sense to start doing significant work on it. I'm not sure we've reached that point yet.


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Rob Cavicchio
Principal Technical Writer & Information Architect
EMC Captiva
Information Intelligence Group
EMC Corporation
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