HTML 5 compatibility

Being a Visual Studio environment programmer, I have been using MVC for about 5 months now. Every time I create a new MVC project, I am given the following two options which I normally default to:

• View engine: ASPX
• Use HTML5 semantic markup: leave unticked

Now, I am no way ready for changing the view engine to Razor. I am still getting my head round the MVC concept and at times struggling to remember simple HTML markup after being .NET lazy for several years and primarily using the .NET standard controls to generate the HTML markup.

But what about HTML5? Last year I attended IWMW10 which held a session on HTML5, and to be honest, it sounded awesome! Even though I did not like its lack of control and standards, I very much looked forward to the added features and gadgets that would be out of the box, rather than having to code lines and lines of javascript. So this feature within Visual Studio is always very tempting.

Before running ahead a enabling this option, I decided to do a quick compatibility test on the three standard browsers (Windows only):

• IE 9
• Firefox 5
• Chrome 12

I found the following website: http://html5test.com/ and here are the results.

Internet Explorer 9

Firefox

 Chrome

Spot the difference!!

So I wonder, why does Microsoft offer the ability in its coding software to write web apps using HTML5 if their browser does not support it? 

Come on catch up!!