Welcome to Internet Explorer 8

Damian Edwards

Senior Consultant

Readify

Lachlan Hardy

Design Engineer

Atlassian

Agenda

The driving principles behind Internet Explorer 8

What are web standards and why should you care?

Compatibility

What about innovation?

WebSlices & Activities

What should I do now?

Questions

What are we going to talk about?

The driving principles behind IE8

Interoperability– Write web pages once and have them work cross

browser

Compatibility– Don’t break web pages that are already out there

Innovation– Introduce new features without effecting the first

two principles

Web StandardsDriving interoperability between browsers

The Three Layers of Web Design

The bare content of a web page: text, paragraph structure, images, tabular dataDefined in W3C standards like HTML 4.01 and XHTMLRepresented by tags with semantic, contextual meaningContent tags include:– <p>, <code>– <h1>, <h2>, <h3>– <em>, <strong>, <cite>, <abbr>– <img>, <a>, <hr>– <ul>, <ol>, <dl>, <table>

Structural tags include:– <div>– <span>

Markup file should consist of mostly content & structure

The Content Layer

marking up content

demodemo

Web Standards

The Three Layers of Web Design

Typography

Dimensions and positioning

Background images and colours

Borders, outlines and bullets

Media specific support for visual browsers, aural devices, printers, Braille devices, handheld devices, etc.

Defined in the W3C standard CSS 2.1

The Presentation Layer

Acid2

demodemo

adding style with CSS

demodemo

Web Standards

The Three Layers of Web Design

ECMAscript-262 (JavaScript)

Manipulation of the HTML document

Defined in W3C standard DOM 1.0 Level 2

Plug-ins

The Behaviour Layer

adding behaviour with JavaScript

demodemo

does it work?

demodemo

Compatibility

Who knows what a DOCTYPE switch is?

First introduced in IE5 for Mac

Worked for a while…

Moving forward… version targeting

How do we not “break the web”

Compatibility

IE8 uses a completely new rendering engine for standards mode, this is used by default for standards mode rendering

Old rendering engine (IE7) is available in both quirks and standards mode

IE8 includes improvements to the DOM implementation that may break existing sites, e.g. no more document.all

Use the X-UA-Compatible http-equiv meta tag to target a rendering/scripting engine mode: IE8, IE7, IE5 (IE7 quirks)

This will be supported going forward so that in IE9 you can target the IE8 rendering engine (no more quirks mode!)

Version Targeting

version targeting

demodemo

What about Innovation?

How does it fit with web standards?

Graceful degradation

Progressive enhancement

Extend functionality

Wide adoption brings wide implementation

Standardisation!

Innovations in IE8

Defines a portion of a page that’s likely to change

User can subscribe to that portion

Highlighted in the page and toolbar like an RSS feed

Added to the favourites bar, highlighted when new content is received

Two classes from hAtom microformat and an extra container<div class="hslice" id="1"> <p class="entry-title">item - $66.00</p> <div class="entry-content">high bidder:buyer1 … </div></div>

WebSlices

Innovations in IE8

Contextual menu options which quickly access a service from any web page

Easiest way to create a “plug-in” that exposes the services of your web site

Used for “look up” and “send to” operations

Described via an XML file

Installed via JavaScript:<button onclick="javascript:window.external.addService('GetMap.xml')">Add Map Activity</button>

Activities

Innovations in IE8

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">  <homepageUrl>http://maps.live.com</homepageUrl>  <display>    <name>Map with Windows Live</name>    <icon>http://www.live.com/favicon.ico</icon>  </display>  <activity category="map">    <activityAction context="selection">      <preview action= "http://maps.live.com/geotager.aspx">        <parameter name="b" value="{selection}"/>        <parameter name="clean" value="true"/>        <parameter name="w" value="320"/>        <parameter name="h" value="240"/>        </preview>      <execute action="http://maps.live.com/default.aspx">        <parameter name="where1" value="{selection}" type="text" />      </execute>    </activityAction>  </activity></openServiceDescription>

Sample Activity

WebSlices & Activities

demodemo

Innovations in IE8

Vastly improved JavaScript performance

Adaptive Zoom

DOM: Storage, Cross Document Messaging (XDM)

CSS Selectors API

ARIA support

Consolidated Add-on management

Security improvements

Loosely-Coupled IE (LCIE) e.g. tabs run out-of-process

Address bar improvements

Other improvements

Summary

Web standards are important to interoperability

Web standards apply to the three layers of web design:– Content– Presentation– Behaviour

IE8 is better adhering to web standards, Acid2

Version targeting allows for compatibility

Innovation is good when done correctly

WebSlices & Activities

What have we seen?

What should you do now?

Download IE8 Beta 1 for Developers

Check your websites

Add version targeting if needed

Update your browser detection code– User agent sniffing– Conditional comments

Learn to use CSS 2.1

WebSlices & Activities

Be prepared for lacking tooling, put pressure back on the tooling vendors via blogs, etc.

Resources

IE Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie W3Schools: http://w3schools.comhttp://xhtml.com/en/css/referencePositionIsEverything: http://www.positioniseverything.netA List Apart: http://www.alistapart.comW3C Validators– (X)HTML: http://validator.w3.org– CSS: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator

MSDN– HTML & CSS reference:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa155110.aspx– CSS Compatibility & Internet Explorer:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc351024(VS.85).aspx

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