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Development Tools Web Accessibility Compliance Semantic HTML and WAI-ARIA HTML5 Semantic Tags

Posted by Garrett Tucker
Garrett Tucker
2,933 Points

How would this display for a user running a browser that does not support HTML5?

If your target demographic is mixed with users who maintain newer updated browsers and those that are still using legacy versions, will you need to implement code that will use the "div soup" format for legacy browsers and the updated html5 version for newer browsers?

1 Answer

tammys
tammys
17,637 Points
tammys
tammys
17,637 Points

It would display as though it were not styled.

Checking 'Can I Use', I found that semantic HTML is supported on all current browsers (https://caniuse.com/#feat=html5semantic). Its pretty robustly supported even going back many browser versions.

But, if you need to support IE8, for example, you'd need to do something like add a div element to the markup. For example, <header><div class="header">. This would maintain accessibility and provide fallback support for old browsers if needed. There are also tools like Modernizr or HTML5Shiv that can help with this.