We are seeing more and more use of HTML5, however, it is being held back largely due to the use of Internet Explorer 8. IE8 will be with us for some time because it works on Windows XP and IE9+ require at least Windows Vista.

Well, I've stumbled over some code that creates most HTML5 tags correctly in IE7 and IE8 through JavaScript.

The script is very easy to use. Just put something like the below in the head portion of your code.

<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="//html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js">
<style type="text/css">
abbr, article, aside, audio, bdi, canvas, data, datalist, details, figcaption, figure, footer, header, hgroup, mark, meter, nav, output, progress, section, summary, time, video {
 display: block;
}
</style>
<![endif]—>

After you put this in the code you can use these tags and for the most part they should work correctly (a few still may have problems, so you will need to test your page in IE7 or IE8).

You can get the code here. here.

HTML5 is the future of the web, although it is taking some time before all browsers have full support for it. The things that can be done with it are nothing short of amazing, especially considering how easy the code really is. Well John Esposito over at the HTMLZone (part of DZone) has written a very good HTML5 example. The example is of an interactive 3D dodecahedron. The post gives a brief overview of the code as will as all of the code that was used to create the effect.

Below is an excerpt from the post.

Thursday's CSS3 bitmaps were clever and fun, but a little counter-HTML5-cultural: the whole point of SVG, Canvas, and so forth, is that vectors are better, because simpler, than bitmaps.

Today's interactive geometric CSS3 shape is just the opposite: far more pixels than pre-rendering could possibly justify, emphatically composed of 2D surfaces, and fully animated in 3D.

It's a folding/unfolding dodecahedron (not in FF/IE):

You can read the full post here.

You can checkout the demo here.

As of today the NetBeans IDE 7.1 is now available for download. The new version of the IDE has support for JavaFX 2.0, CSS3, new PHP debug features and more features and enhancements. If you are a user of the Netbeans IDE then you will probably want to upgrade for the new features.

Below are the highlights of the new release according to the NetBeans web site.
Release Highlights

• First to Support JavaFX 2.0
• UI Debugger for JavaFX and Swing
• Enhanced Java Editor
• WebLogic 12c and GlassFish 3.1.1
• Industry leading Maven support
• Git integration
• Improved PHP support
• New Java EE Features

You can read more about the release here or you can get the new download here.