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IE9 Preview Touts Cross Browser Compatibility
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 development team has announced the availability of the third IE9 platform preview release on the IE blog. Dean Hachamovitch writes, 'The third Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, available now, continues the deep work around hardware acceleration to enable the same standards-based markup to run faster. This is the latest installment of the rhythm we started in March, delivering platform preview releases approximately every eight weeks and listening to developers. You'll see more performance, same markup, and hardware-accelerated HTML5.' The announcement focuses on cross-browser compatibility, noting that when 'developers spend less time rewriting their sites to work across browsers they have more time to create amazing experiences on the Web.' Curiously, however, the video embedded in the page works only in some browsers. Dear Microsoft, IE9 supports many royalty-free, web-compatible formats out of the box (HTML, CSS, WOFF, PNG, and the like) so why not at least one more?"
Browsers can be made to be standards compliant. Web pages can be made to be cross-browser compatible (since not all browsers are standards compliant).
If you still see websites as just online magazines then I guess you're somewhat stuck in the 1990's.
/. is using AJAX these days.
What you suggest is like asking: Why can't we make programmes also run on Windows 95, just without all the fancy effects of Aero?
Like it or not websites will become more interactive, even
See also Google Docs, or http://www.jsdesk.com/
Did anyone else think that we really have to thank the Mozilla team for this? Without Firefox, none of this would have happened. Wed’d still use IE6.
Firefox tends do go a bit downwards in quality, lately. But I don’t care. Thank you, Mozilla team! Every single one of you. Everyone who installed and promoted it. And the team who made the great logo and CI, that’s so fashionable that non-geek women put in on their t-shirts.
*grabs web-Oscar, steps down from the podium and runs away with it!*
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
(Apologies for replying to myself.)
The biggest problem when discussing web standards is that the vendors themselves propose the standards. So Apple is the most compliant with Apple's proposed standards, while Microsoft is the most compliant with Microsoft's proposed standards, etc. From the W3C's POV they are all the same, while the marketplace sorts these things out into common "cross-browser" features versus things which are considered "proprietary".
In other words, nobody cares that CSS3 rounded borders aren't an official "standards compliant" feature, it is a "cross browser" feature and they want rounded fucking corners on their website.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I am, I suppose, well behind the times. Some years ago, websites were able to publish information and update the databases they sat in front of (to do things like take orders for merchandise or carry on a conversation), all over secure connections. Thus, in the beginning the web established usefulness as a publishing medium. Then it was a tool to get things done.
Since then, pretty much everything I've seen in various "WebX.0" applications has done the same stuff in different ways.
So...beyond what we had years ago, what sorts of "interactivity" actually serve a useful purpose?
I'm not trying to be an obtuse old man. Seriously, I'd like to know. Maybe there's some really useful thing that I should be doing via the web that I'm not doing now. But I can't really think of what that might be and I'd like some help to figure it out. What new interactivity justifies the visual pollution and system crud that are (apparently) required to make use of it?
Note - "Mobile" apps don't count. I can understand why I might need some specialized program when I'm trying to get something done while moving around. I haven't bought into the "I live through my smartphone" lifestyle, though. I'm asking about things that are useful to me when I sit down at my desktop computer.