When would it be best to move to html5/css3?

I understand that many are concerned with browser compatibility, but I just wanted to know when, if at all, you plan to change your website to html5/css3?

Several months ago.

Looking at the installed base in general, and specifically for my target users, less than 2% would have compatibility issues as long as you are using well adopted aspects of 5 & 3. And I found that for reasonably modern browsers (as old as 4 years old) HTML5 was easier to get to behave the same across browsers. I found that currently used browsers also tended to degrade gracefully for the features not yet implemented.

One example, I had a client who wanted rounded corners on a box. The old faked rounded corners were horrible to get to behave consistently across browsers and make sure they didn't do screwy things when the site changed. (The original implementation which preceded me was done with gifs on a table, which was common practice.) The code was a pain to sort through for content chages. Since changing to HTML5 with CSS -border-radius it's been a breeze. A very small minority of consumers on very old browsers don't see the rounded corners. No big deal to them as they don't even notice. Huge deal for me for the amount of work it saves and how much easier it is to update the site now.

Personally I won't really be going into HTML5 in any real depth depth just yet as it's not a standard and I am more interested in other languages now because I believe to be a top coder you should have very good understanding of at least 5 languages, such as HTML,CSS,PHP,JavaScript and let's say it would be very beneficial to have good understanding of databases such as MYSQL.

As for CSS3 the only thing I use from it is rounded borders for the same reason EEsterling said as if it doesn't work on a users computer, it's not the end of the world and they won't even know, it doesn't affect your content in the slightest.

By the sounds of it you already have a site and are looking to convert it, so I'd start doing it now.

I was given a link to a very very useful site which you can reference to see which features from HTML5 and CSS3 are compatible with the versions of the most popular browsers.

Here it is: http://caniuse.com/

Very useful site.

Hope it helps you.

Kind regards,

NM.

I've seen that site and it is very useful. thanks for sharing.