[eropple]

I am well with the program--I'm not the one advocating the use of modernizr or other hacks instead of building HTML that actually works on its own merits. The "HTML5" used by Facebook et al. is a very, very limited subset. The overwhelming majority of their work is valid HTML4! Your argument to authority is foolish.

HTML5 is a perfectly good tool, but relying on it and a JavaScript library to smooth it over because it doesn't fully exist yet is crazy. If you are not writing a web application--an application, not a "website"--and it breaks because someone has JavaScript off, you screwed up. I know that's a foreign concept to somebody inculcated into the bizarre little world of Ruby, but you're throwing simplicity out for buzzwords.

For better or for worse (and believe me, I am strongly of the opinion that it is worse), IE is not dead. These people you presume to teach are not 'opinionated' towards whether people using IE et al. should be marginalized and made second-class citizens. You, however, presume to make a decision for them that they have to make for themselves. And that's not right.

[jenius]

It's what happens with any teacher you get. Everyone has a way that they do things and their own opinions, and my opinion is use html5, always. Just so happens that this is also the opinion of the majority of web devs.

To be fair, you are right though - I should at very least educate people about this before teaching it. I will make sure to let my students know that if they would like to decrease the quality of their products based on 2% of people (that's data from 2007 as well, likely has gone significantly down) who browse with javascript off, then they should not use any html5 tags. Fair enough?