Internet Explorer 8 brings some real changes

Internet Explorer 8 is coming! Maybe it’s just me but I initially wasn't swept away with excitement. It's just a browser, and as most of my TAFE students would say, Firefox is still ahead of the game.  But it turns out there’s more going on here than just a minor upgrade.I looked at Beta 1 (it should have been called a developer preview as it’s not really for end users to test).

So what’s IE 8 bringing? The first technology is Slices, allowing you to subscribe to updates in a portion of a webpage. Pages have to be coded to support this feature. This isn’t a closely guarded Microsoft secret; they’ve handed over the specification to the community at large through the Creative Commons license. When you add a slice as a mini-favourite it shows up in the new Favorites Bar. News areas on a site are candidates for this feature as are weather reports. It’s a nice, visual way to get updated information and to me it’s more intuitive than RSS feeds. But I’m sure portions of the internet community are going to be really cranky with the fact that it’s not a standard (unlike RSS). Time will tell.

Activities are the return of a “sometimes used” feature of Office (since Office XP) – Smart Tags. This is a way to incorporate web services from other sites directly in a web page. Highlight a street address and a small menu or popup with links to Live Earth maps (or Yahoo maps) comes up. If there’s a word on a page that you need defined just highlight it and an explanation is provided by an installed Activity provider. Or a foreign word could be translated to English, again just by highlighting.

This is the challenge with Activities, while Smart Tags in Office are fairly limited to Microsoft provided ones, Activities will live or die by third party participation. There’s already a Yahoo Map plug in and I’m sure other web service providers will add to the ones on offer.

One major change in IE 8 is the stated goal of following standards to the letter. Yep, for the first time, IE will not have to be treated as a “special kid” when you create websites. Full CSS 2.1 support is built in and IE 8 should also pass the Acid2 compatibility test. Full compliance with HTML 4.01 and the HTML 5 Draft DOM Storage standard and the Selector API are in place.

Another cool thing is a fix for the Back and Forward button issue. If you have an AJAX web application the Back button can be set to take you back one step in the application rather than leaving the page altogether as is the case today.

You can also slipstream IE 8 into a Vista image so that it’s automatically part of new deployments of your SOE. But more about that in my blog next week.

To see IE 8 in action through screen casts (from a Microsoft perspective) check out Matt Hester’s blog here and here.

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Paul Schnackenburg is a small business IT consultant and teacher.