in all browsers, even browsers that supposedly support HTML5. If you go to the landing page that launches the video in Firefox or even the forthcoming IE9 (which isn’t out yet, but is very HTML5-friendly), it detects your browser and suggests you use Chrome instead. I received the following message on Firefox:

This site was designed with Google Chrome in mind and is unable to render properly in your browser. For the best viewing experience, we recommend downloading Google Chrome and trying this site again.

But wait, isn’t Firefox one of those “modern browsers” that supports HTML5? This isn’t the first time there have been issues with HTML5 compatibility. The problem is that HTML5 is so young that the standards have not been hammered out yet across all browsers. The markup language required to produce the same effect is different for different browsers.

“The Arcade Fire thing . . . they are writing to the browser,” points out Dean Hachamovitch, the Microsoft general manager in charge of Internet Explorer. “They use proprietary Javascript.” HTML5 “done right,” he contends, would be using the same markup language across browsers. Seems reasonable. That is what the open Web is all about. It is why we have standards. But HTML5 is so new that we are getting flashbacks to the late 1990s with sites refusing to accept certain browsers.

To illustrate this point, Microsoft has an HTML5 test page set up that changes the border around a block of text. Inside the block of text, it shows the markup code required to create different effects such as animating it or creating dots instead of a solid line. Here is what the code looks like in Chrome:

And here is what it looks like in Firefox

What’s wrong with these pictures? One takes 16 lines of code, the other takes four, and they are completely different.  Even the dots that are created don’t match (Chrome’s dots are square).  A different set of HTML5 code is required for IE9.  ”We want to make the same markup work everywhere,” says Hachamovitch.  ”If you have to write that differently for every browser it is kind of missing the point.”

Microsoft is working with the standards bodies, as are all the other browser makers, but what is really needed is better definitions and a thorough set of reference examples for every possible HTML5 feature.  It’s a lot of work.  Eventually, we will get there. But until then, expect to see grandstanding about which browser does HTML5 better.  When you hear that, just ask yourself, which version of HTML5 are they talking about.

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Authors: Erick Schonfeld

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