Groovy / Grails ‘personality’ (and I mean that in the most fondest use of the term) Scott Davis presents a great round up of some cool HTML features.
InfoQ: Tomorrow’s Tech Today: HTML5.
He introduces some good tools and utils that help the forward compatible specification be read by HTML4 browsers none the wiser.
Firstly the HTML5 CSS trick to treat all the new HTML5 elements (header, nav, footer, video) to be treated as block elements in all browsers (except IE) and the html5shiv that does the same thing for IE.
Trivia: <input type=”someType”> gets rendered as a textbox if yourbrowser doesnt knowhow to show it.
There are some references to these sites which talk more about HTML
DiveIntoHtml5.org – an upcoming o’reilly book you can read for free here
He talks about some stuff I wasnt too aware of such as HTML5 caching support (5mb) and SQL (25mb but no FF or IE, but useful for iPhone and Android browsers)
Modernizr (detect support for HTML5 & CSS3) – see findmebyip.com for an example.
“The goal is to program for HTML 5 and backfill for the rest of the browsers”