Ooo-okay then: there’s good news, and there’s, well, there’s Internet Explorer.

First the good news – I have located an honest-to-goodness (if “highly experimental”) HTML5 validator, and after whacking a few niggly bits, we are now officially valid HTML 5 code, at least as far as the front page goes. And we so fresh, we so raw, there isn’t even a badge for it yet!

Every other page, at least every page with images on it, is certain to fail validation at this point. I will seek out the database search-and-replace plugin that I remember downloading, long ago, and fix the post images with that. Back when I got it, it looked far too scary to actually use, so I never did.

And now for the bad news: It has been brought to my attention that this page now looks completely monged when viewed with Internet Explorer (any version), although it must be said, not quite as monged as it did earlier this afternoon. It seems that IE does not support any of the new page elements, like <nav>, <section>, <header> or <footer>, and at least one source I’ve checked suggests that Microsoft won’t be getting with the program anytime soon. No surprise there.

I’ve had a look at the traffic on this site by browser share, and while the decline of Explorer market share is immensely gratifying, it still hasn’t fallen much below 40 percent. So, I have some decisions to make.

First off, I will almost certainly not be downgrading back to XHTML 1.0 to wait for Microsoft to catch up with the civilised world. Every other browser supports HTML5 to some extent, and I’ve yet to find one that can’t cope with the implementation here.

So, most likely this page will load with a splash panel which will offer a screenshot of how the page looks to the rest of us, a choice of links to download proper browsers, and possibly a bit of Microsoft mockery.

Such is the state of my current thinking. If the above strikes any knowledgable person as a particularly bad idea, please make some noise in the comments.