HTML 5 / HTML5

[MikeGale]

I think we agree on those elements. It could be formulated as guidelines of which parts of HTML5 not to use. In other words you can make HTML 5 pages, provided you leave out features. Not sure what that would bring to the party however! (Also raises the spectre of using X-UA-Compatible.)

The issue I see with IE8, is that it's the latest browser on many pre windows 7 machines. You can't put IE9 on them. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think IE9 is for Win7, Vista SP2 and 2008.) (That seems to be an immovable decision. The browser uses DX 11 and GPU acceleration.)

I just had a look at OS market shares.

On http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10 I see XP is the biggest single OS bar none. (That includes iOS's and Androids.) It is measured at 43%. A year earlier it seems to have been 54%. (A wikipedia number for March also gives 43%, when calculated out. StatOwl is quoting something like 30%, haven't compared their techniques, to explore why.)

Estimating from there, the demise of XP looks like it's measured in years.

Given that, for a general audience, use of a lot of HTML5 is a few years away. (Unless you don't care about broken experiences for some.)

Raises the temptation for two versions of pages.

From the viewpoint of offering suggestions. The change in OS share is quite slow, so suggestions don't substantially change with every new version of Chrome or Firefox (a good thing).