HTML5: everyone’s doing it!

The Next Web have reported on a survey by Kendo UI that 82% of developers think HTML5 is important to their jobs now or within the next 12 months.

What’s interesting is the relatively large survey size (about 4000 developers), which immediately makes me take a bit more notice than a typical vendor-sponsored survey. I was also interested by the responses to opinions on Facebook’s dropping of HTML5 for their iOS app, with only about 14% of those surveyed expressing any lack of confidence as a result. Perhaps they agree that it was quite ambitious trying to support 500 million users on 7000 different mobile devices with a single solution!

One outcome that slightly surprised me was the concern about browser fragmentation. Over 70% of respondents were worried by this. At Caplin we find that HTML5 browsers area actually much less fragmented than the old days of supporting IE6,7,8 (plus all the good browsers too!). But I guess if you’re writing 3D games or using some of the more emerging features then maybe that’s more of a concern. It certainly still bugs me that I need 4 different CSS3 prefixes to achieve the same thing in all browsers…