So what have I learned?

HTML5

Not convinced, at least not yet. The bread and butter <section>, <header> don’t feel like a massive leap from HTML4/XHTML1. I’m not even sure who is meant to benefit from the new semantics, I just assumed search engines but surely they’re too busy ruining SERPs with Twitter updates to worry about unpopular new technologies.

The cooler stuff like <video> has problems and while <canvas> can do impressive things like 3D mazes it’s not much use for day to day web development. It could be useful for graphs but flot has been around for a while and I’ve never had to call on it, I just don’t work in the world of dynamic graphs.

On top of this, Flash has a very real market penetration and already does both these things better. In my humble opinion.

MVC

Or in this case, CodeIgniter. I like it, having not come from a programming background MVC was all quite new to me, although I soon discovered I had used it before but hadn’t called it that before.

Will I stick with CodeIgniter? Not really for day to day stuff, it doesn’t fit in with the existing code that we use for everything. For one off projects, quite possibly. Either way, it has improved my PHP so even if I never use it again it was worth the time investment.

CSS3

So lots of it isn’t supported, or at least not properly, but unsupported stuff gets ignored so I can fill my CSS with last-child and border-radius (plus the appropriate -moz and -webkit variations) and browsers just get on and do their thing. Progressive enhancment wins!

Personally, I would prefer to see more CSS3 support in browsers than anything HTML5. But that’s just me and what do I know?