There's been a lot of commotion over the last week since the W3C announced that <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/w3c-hold-html5-in-websites-041?page=0,0">HTML5 is not ready yet for deployment to websites</a>. Some really <a href="http://remy.tumblr.com/post/1261575750/hold-off-on-deploying-html5-in-websites">smart</a> <a href="http://almaer.com/blog/dont-deploy-html5-thanks-again-w3c">people</a> have weighed in on this topic and I agree with their thoughts. Last Thursday, I did a presentation on the new features of HTML5 and part of that was demonstrating how polyfills work to allow you to leverage these new features while still providing a good cross-browser experience.

What's a Polyfill?

I really love Paul Irish's definition since it sums it up perfectly:

<blockquote>polyfill: A shim that mimics a future API, providing fallback functionality to older browsers.</blockquote>


