HTML5Please is a new website that enables developers to look up HTML5 and CSS3 features and discover if they're ready for prime-time. Created by the people behind HTML5 Boilerplate, Modernizr and CSS3 Please!, the new site provides straightforward guidance for each element and property, with coloured flags and information regarding browser support and any required fallbacks and polyfills. An integrated filter enables you to rapidly refine your search to just the features you're interested in.
We spoke to the team, who issued us with a joint statement regarding the inspiration behind the site and how it will benefit the web community. "The idea of starting something like this was born out of a conversation between Divya Manian and Paul Irish on 9 May. Tim Branyen got involved in setting us up with a robust build system that allows contributors to easily add new features. As a result more people got involved in adding more data," the team said. On benefitting designers, we were told: "Mainly, we hope the site will help developers avoid using features that are not standards-friendly – we don't want developers to be caught off-guard down the road. We also hope it will enable developers to know when best to implement features and also what fallbacks and polyfills to use."
In terms of the site's future, the team told us: "Already we've seen a massive community contribution to the site, with people submitting new information and refining the recommendations. We hope this will continue, because the site is a focal point of implementation knowledge-sharing, handing down experience to all developers." Plans also include better integration with caniuse and Google Analytics, which will provide the means to customise recommendations to your site's browser-share figures. "We will also certainly cover more ground, recommending how best to use things such as requestAnimationFrame, <input type=search>, WebRTC, Gamepad API and more," the statement added.
For more insight into the making of HTML5Please, read Divya Manian's blog post on the subject.
