Internet Explorer and HTML5

Unfortunately, that dang Internet Explorer requires a bit of wrangling in order to understand the new HTML5 elements.

All elements, by default, have a display of inline.

In order to ensure that the new HTML5 elements render correctly as block level elements, it’s necessary at this time to style them as such.

header, footer, article, section, nav, menu, hgroup {
   display: block;
}

Unfortunately, Internet Explorer will still ignore these stylings, because it has no clue what, as an example, the header element even is. Luckily, there is an easy fix:

document.createElement("article");  
document.createElement("footer");  
document.createElement("header");  
document.createElement("hgroup");  
document.createElement("nav");  
document.createElement("menu");

Strangely enough, this code seems to trigger Internet Explorer. To simply this process for each new application, Remy Sharp created a script, commonly referred to as the HTML5 shiv. This script also fixes some printing issues as well.

<!--[if IE]>
<script src="http://html5shim.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

Internet Explorer and HTML5