Channel 9 - Entries tagged with Web standards

Touch-First Experiences in IE 10

Roxanne Beaver — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 23:19:34 GMT

For Windows 8, we built Internet Explorer 10 to be a first-in-class browser for touch. Not only did we want it to be fast and fluid with panning and zooming of the web you use today, but we also wanted to enable web developers to build exciting new experiences that take advantage of multi-touch and gestures.

For more information, please see the additional topic here:

Make your site touch-ready

Dean Hachamovitch: IE9 - Questions and Answers

Charles — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 03:15:59 GMT

Not too long ago, a thread in the Coffeehouse was posted asking for your IE9 questions for Dean Hachamovitch, VP of Engineering for Internet Explorer. Thank you for asking such great questions, Niners! We didn't have time cover all of them, but we did manage to get through several of them (and there was some redundancy, too, so I took the liberty of choosing the questions. Also, I didn't ask any of the snarkier questions (though I probably could have, since Dean can handle it) and Dean did not want to see the questions before they were asked (which is commonplace among many executives). He's OldSchool9 that way and that's great!).

IE9 PP7 was released today and inside of it is one of the world's fastest JS engines (according to the SunSpider suite of JS performance tests, IE9 PP7 is faster than all other browsers out there...). Chakra, the IE9 JS engine, continues to evolve! Hats off to the Chakra team. Interestingly, Dean isn't overly excited about this news (though, obviously, he's thrilled) since JS execution speed is but one part of the overall performance story, which is actually divided into several pieces, not just two or three (see Jason Weber's quick chat on the overall performance characteristics that combine to form a user's experience of blazing fast web surfing, and read the IE team's blog post on the subject).

Here are the unedited questions Dean answered in this morning's conversation in the IE engineering building. Thank you, Dean, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to engage Niners' questions and concerns in an honest and open way. There is bonus footage at the end, too

I recommend watching all of this as the flow is nice and the questions lead into one another nicely. Great job, Niners! This is a 51 minute interview, which is a long time in VP Time. Dean's a big fan of yours, Niners.

[Questions begin at 00:14:15, asked in the order listed below. Click on a question to go directly to the answer in the video. I do recommend that you watch/listen to the entire conversation as it flows naturally from question to question with many questions and answers nicely building on those that come before and after...]

CKurt:

How you do personally feel about the way the HTML 5 standard is progressing? It's talking such a long time to form, it's slowing down the evolution of the uniform internet and causing more and more fragmentation between browsers. Is it not?

Bas:

What if the HTML5 standard changes/is finalized within IE9's lifetime and before IE10 is out. What's going to happen? A patch?

JoshRoss:

Windows 7 had a tremendous amount of telemetry captured from the beta users and that information was immensely valuable. Was or is there any telemetry data collected from current or past testers?

Exoteric:

How do you measure Internet Explorer stability and when it's ready for RTM? Does the beta have any kind of telemetry for latencies: when the GUI freezes, when a page takes a long time to load, etc.
How many test cases do you have for IE9 at this point?

ZippyV:

Will we be able to write javascript or .net plugins for IE? We need an easier way to interact deeply with the browser but writing native plugins is too difficult and accelerators can't go deep enough.

Nazmus1992:

Are you anxious to see if Mozilla actually sends in a cake to the IE team when IE9 ships?

Do you plan to have IE score a 100 in the acid3 test?

Typhoon87:

Will platform previews continue after RTW release so we can see where you are heading for the next release? You seem to be about a 6 week or so window for the platform previews currently.

Any possibility of smaller update window between releases? eg will we be likely to see IE 9.1 or 9.5 that is smaller in scope but quicker to market?

US Archer:

What improvements have been made around touch support? Is the UI fully baked in this Beta?

What is the state of webslices, something you still encourage site developers to implement? For IE9, it would be really useful if we could preview these from the pinned site icon.

AndyC:

Does the IE team still feel like they're playing catch up or are they now at a point where future versions of IE might start to drive new ideas once again?

IE 9: Standards and Interoperability

Charles — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:22:00 GMT

The IE team is busy working on the next version of the world's most popular browser. IE 8 is the most widely used browser on Windows. IE 9 is currently in the oven and the IE team is ready to talk about what they're working on. Here, IE GM Dean Hachamovitch introduces some of the key advances his team is making and leads us through the halls of IE (literarally) to learn from the engineers who are building the future of IE. John Hrvatin and Kris Krueger talk to us about where they are with improvements in IE 9's interoperability and standards support.

Configuring WebDAV Extension and Deploying PHP Applications

Phil Pennington — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:33:00 GMT

The IIS WebDAV extension module incorporates new features that enable web authors to publish content easier than before, and offers web administrators more security and deployment options.

Windows Server 2008 R2 incorporates the WebDAV extension module feature. All you have to do is to enable it.

Watch this how-to demo and learn more about IIS Extensions here.

See more Windows Server2008 R2 webcasts.

Find samples at MSDN Code Gallery.

Inside IE 8 RC1 with Dean Hachamovitch and Jason Upton

Charles — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:34:00 GMT

IE team General Manager Dean Hachamovitch and IE Test Manager Jason Upton sit down with me to discuss the significance of today's IE 8 RC1 release. What did the IE team learn from the Beta 2 release? What changes did they make in response to customer feedback? Will the IE team still take and act upon fedback now that RC1 is here? With so many browsers on the market today how does IE remain competitive and maintain marketshare? No conversation on IE can be complete, of course, without talking about the web platform and standards so we go there....

Of course, you can expect this discussion to continue at MIX09 (and you'll be a key participant in the conversation with Dean and team in Vegas).

See the IE Blog for more detailed info on what's in IE8 RC1.

Tune in. This is a great conversation with two key leaders behind and in front of IE (Dean is the all up team leader (as you know by now given how many times you've seen him on C9 and at various conferences) and Jason is responsible for overall product quality (he owns the stuff you seldom see or hear about - software testing)).

Scott Isaacs: Introducing Web Sandbox

Charles — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:19:00 GMT

Web Sandbox is a project from Live Labs, a group focused on Internet technologies. Dragos Manolescu (who worked on Live Labs and Political Streams) and Scott Isaacs (who worked on Windows Live Gadgets and is credited with the creation of DHTML) made the initial project pitch. Since then the Web Sandbox team leveraged the expertise of and talent from other groups interested in securing the web, such as Windows Live, MSN and DP Languages.

You have to check this out:
http://websandbox.livelabs.com/

Please try and break the isolation model by injecting clever scripts on the websandbox website. If you find gaping holes, share it right in the forums on the site (they are fundamentally transparent).

Enjoy!

Discussing Web Standards with Molly and Jonathan

Joshua Allen — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:45:00 GMT

HTML5 reached working draft status yesterday, and A List Apart just published a thoughtful analysis of IE8's departure from DOCTYPE switching. So what better time to publish our interview with Molly Holzschlag and Jonathan Snook? In this interview, they touch on some of the hot political issues with standards -- a conversation that we'll continue at Web Directions North and MIX08. Enjoy!

IE 8: On the Path to Web Standards Compliance - ACID 2 Test Pass Complete

Charles — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:03:00 GMT

The IE team has been very hard at work on IE 8 for the past several months and they hit a huge milestone last Friday evening. The IE dev team checked in a bunch of code that included several new features implemented in the core rendering engine that enable IE to pass the ACID 2 test! This is great news for web developers: IE 8 is going to be our most standards compliant browser to date. Passing ACID 2 is really a combined side effect of all the new features that have been developed for IE 8.

In this interview, I sit down with IE GM Dean Hachamovitch and Architect Chris Wilson to discuss this milestone and dig into compliance in general, lessons learned from IE 7 and discuss the IE team's ultimate goal of de facto interoperability. Of course, no Channel 9 interview is complete without meeting some of the devs who actually write technology so we take a walk from Dean's office to super developer Alex Mogilevsky's office to discuss what's been done to provide IE with the core rendering features that enable IE 8 to pass the ACID 2 test. We also chat with CSS guru Markus Mielke who was instrumental in identifying and planning the feature set required to pass ACID 2.

Tune in!

IE8 Acid 2 CSS: Success!

Joshua Allen — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:52:00 GMT

Hot off the presses, we just announced that IE8 is successfuly rendering the Acid 2 CSS tests! This is a big deal, not the least because we hadn't publicly committed to doing this. Charles Torre grabbed a camera to get the scoop from Dean and the IE8 development team.

I had hoped that we could keep the news secret until MIX08, but the masses were demanding information. And we have plenty of other good news about IE8 to make MIX exciting.

Understanding Web Design

Joshua Allen — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 22:31:00 GMT

Today Zeldman published what will go down in history as one of his best posts ever. Like Donald Norman harping on unusable designs that "probably won an award", or Bill Buxton emphasizing that aesthetics is only a small part of design, Zeldman says that many traditional print designers miss the point when they critique web site design.

Here's an excerpt:

"Efforts to avoid boxiness have been around since 1995; while occasionally successful, they have most often produced aesthetically wretched and needlessly unusable designs. The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.

If she achieves all that and sweats the details, her work will be beautiful. If not everyone appreciates this beauty—if not everyone understands web design—then let us not cry for web design, but for those who cannot see."

Making Your Site Work With Opera

Joshua Allen — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 01:08:00 GMT

Opera is the 4th most popular PC-based browser, with high usage share in Northern and Eastern Europe. They are also the browser for Nintendo Wii and 100 million mobile devices. Opera is well-known for excellent standards support -- their CTO invented CSS, and they are often the first to implement new standards.

I've been working with these guys for awhile, and I recently got the chance to interview Jan and David while they were in Mountain View. We covered a lot of information that will help you avoid proprietary browser behaviors and have your site look as good in Opera as in IE7 or any other modern browser. We also discuss the industry situation a bit.

If you prefer to read text, you can read the transcript here.

Some of the resources mentioned in the interview:

I even encoded the interview in Ogg Theora for playback from the proposed tag in the new Opera Labs build of Kestrel. Enjoy!

Leaflets for iPhone: Beautiful Standards-Based Design

Joshua Allen — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:42:00 GMT

Leaflets are mobile apps for your iPhone, written completely using web standards. Conventional wisdom says that you need to use special SDKs or runtimes to take full advantage of mobile or produce professional-looking rich UI. But the guys at Blue Flavor have proven that it's possible to build a beautiful, responsive, and professional mobile UI based purely on web standards.

The UI is seamlessly integrated with the phone UI, and many operations are sped up for improved responsiveness on the edge network. I asked Brian Fling to give a quick demo of Leaflets, and more importantly, to explain how they managed to do this with web standards.

The video starts with the details about how they built leaflets, and the demo starts about halfway in. Check it out!

Jon Udell: Chris Wilson on IE7, Ajax, and web standards

JonUdell — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 22:48:42 GMT

Hi, this is Jon Udell. In this first installment of my new Microsoft Conversations series I got together with Chris Wilson. He's been involved with Internet Explorer and with web standards for over a decade. We talked about the history and evolution of IE, about Ajax, about ways of extending the browser -- ranging from bookmarklets to Firefox extensions to plug-ins -- and about the W3C's invitation to Chris to chair its new HTML working group.