Okay, maybe it doesn’t have to be 100% DIY. I just found my first reason to compromise: Modernizr. It seems that this open source script automatically detects which fun new features of HTML5 and CSS3 are supported by the viewing web browser. This may come in very handy.
As a side note, check this out:
I would have hoped that a web site promoting a fancy script to help web programmers with CSS wouldn’t break like this in Chrome, supposedly one of the better browsers when it comes to CSS3 & HTML5 support.