Does/Will SharePoint 2010 support HTML5?

This is one of most frequently asked questions from my audience in recent SharePoint talks. There seems to be a lot of interest in HTML5 and using it in SharePoint 2010. I gave a talk on Extending SharePoint 2010 with HTML 5 and excerpts from the same are listed below:
Depending on what you want, the answer may be quite different. Before we come to conclusion, here are some facts about current state of SharePoint 2010 and HTML5
1.    SharePoint is from family of application rendering output in XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 and hence does not have built-in HTML 5 support. The Output HTML is not HTML 5.
2.    Mostly, it is up to browsers to support content rendering and same is true for SharePoint.
3.    SharePoint usages Master Pages and content rendering can be controlled through Master Page.
Considering above points,
  • If the need is to output SharePoint pages in HTML 5 that can be validated, we need to wait for future releases of SharePoint (Wave 15).
  • If you want HTML5 tags into SharePoint 2010 pages, this can be achieved by making changes to Master Page.

Changes required:
In SharePoint 2010 master pages, change the DOCTYPE to HTML5,  
Replace
“<DOCTYPEhtmlPUBLIC“-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd&#8221;>”
with
“<!DOCTYPEhtml>”

Also note, by default, most SharePoint 2010 master pages have the following meta tag in them:

“<metahttp-equiv=“Content-Type”content=“text/html; charset=utf-8” />”

Delete it.

With the DOCTYPE changed and the meta tag deleted, the master pages renders as an HTML5 page

Hope it will help in finding the right answer for your scenario. 

The slides used during presentation can be found below:
Html5 with SharePoint 2010

View more PowerPoint from Hemant Joshi