HTML5, CSS, and IE6

7th July 2010

The other day I created a HTML5 webpage with a flash fallback for IE users. Everything worked fine except IE 6 wasn't rendering styles associated to the new HTML 5 tags. After digging around for a while I discovered that IE 6 won't render styles associated with HTML tags it doesn't know, unless you do a little bit of JavaScript trickry. For each unknown tag type you have to create it once in JavaScript like so:

document.createElement('video');

After that the styles should render correctly.