HTML5

HTML5 brought many good features, but it also brought back user-agent sniffing.

User-Agent sniffing is the nemesis of good modern web development, and that's for a good reason. As a person who uses Opera since version 4 as his main browser for surfing (not for development though) I have suffered through many bad scripts which try to exclude me just on the grounds I am using neither Internet Explorer nor Firefox. Or neither Internet Explorer nor Netscape. I have ranted against scripts that told me my browser was outdated and I should switch do a newer, faster and better browser like IE, even though I used the latest ubuntu version of Opera.Read more

If you had the chance to build a website from scratch. A website that is going to be launched in the late summer of this year. And an old version of that website already exists, which will be maintained but not developed further...

How would you build the frontend?

I have given that some thought in the last time. And here are the three most important conclusions I came to:

1. Use HTML5 excessively
2. Style with CSS3
3. Drop IE support

While the first two might seem obvious, the third sounds like madness. How can I seriously even think of excluding like fifty percent of the users (less in Europe, more in the US)? It's only logical (and I admit I'll cut that down a little later on). But let me explain the first two points first.Read more

Use HTML5 excessively