I had the fortune to attend the MIX conference last week. Although my notes are little late (more on that later), I wanted to get them up here soon enough for your reading enjoyment.
Dean Hachamovitch took the stage at MIX to finally layout the plans for the next release of Internet Explorer - IE8. Here are a few quick notes that I was able to capture while sitting in an overflow room with about 200-300 other Microsoft employees.
IE 8 Beta 1 is available now - this is a build release purely for developers and web designers. Dean said they focused on security for IE7. With IE8 the focus moves to the developer and the semantic web. Dean highlighted several points:
- IE 8 is targeting CSS 2.1 compliance. IE has been knocked for its CSS implementations in the past. Most of that was due to either implementations before a standard existed or the ambiguity that surrounds the CSS specification. Microsoft feels that CSS 2.1 is less ambiguous and will work with the developer community and the standards committees to make interpretation is inline.
- CSS Certification - Microsoft is contributing over 700 test cases to the CSS working group. These test cases are available to the open community as well.
- Performance - huge performance increases since IE7. Coming closer inline with other recently released browsers. There is more work to do in this area before IE8 ships.
- HTML5 - start of support for HTML5, deeper integration between the browser and AJAX, and making web pages network aware.
- Developer Tools - dev tools integration in the browser, including debugging support. One of the interesting features here is the dynamic page analysis in which the dev tools will report back the HTML as it stands in memory. Think of how AJAX calls may modify the DOM during runtime. Dynamic analysis will report back what’s the true state of the DOM, not what was first loaded from the initial server request. Very cool!
- Activities - smart tags for the web? Highlight an address and a context pops up that links you to Live Maps. Highlight a product name and link to an Ebay auction for that item. This is all done through minimal XML markup within the HTML elements themselves.
- WebSlices - “subscribe” to a portion of web content on a page. Such as an Ebay auction watch window, your friends status in Facebook, the current weather listing on Weather.com, etc. Once again, minimal XML markup within the HTML elements defines a web slice.
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