At the end of last year, Nathan Staines contacted me to say that he’d begun work on an HTML5 version of my Starkers WordPress theme. I’ve been considering an HTML5 implementation of Starkers for some time now but I’ve never got round to it due to other commitments, so it’s great to see that someone else has taken it on.

As of today, Nathan’s version is available to download and is called ‘Starkers HTML5’.

Cheers to Nathan for putting in the work. I hope this proves useful for those of you who want to author your themes with the markup language of tomorrow. Because of the increased popularity of HTML5 and its relatively widespread adoption by the forward-thinking browsers, I may even phase out the non-HTML5 version. Maybe.

Kushal Pisavadia has also created an HTML5 interpretation of Starkers, which can be found on GitHub.

EDIT: I almost forgot: Karl Dawson got in there ages ago with the first real HTML5 variant of Starkers in the shape of A Brave New World.

By the way, because WordPress 3.0 is on the horizon and will ship with a new Default theme, I’m currently holding off on any Starkers updates. When 3.0 is released, I’ll re-write Starkers from scratch using the new Default theme as a base (unless the new Default theme’s code is clean enough to negate the need for Starkers’ continued existence, that is).

Watch this space.

UPDATE: Having discovered the existence of another theme framework called ‘Genesis’, we’ve renamed the project to simply ‘Starkers HTML5’. Sorry for any confusion that may have caused.