Scott Stults
Category: Uncategorized
IE 8 Beta 1 will be released after the keynote, which is still currently going on as I write this. IE has been play catching up of late, but it seems IE 8 has not only caught up, but is now pushing the envelope with user interaction with the browser, that just might make the browser loveable again.
IE 8 has caught up with Firefox with its now complete CSS 2.1 support, supporting standards mode by default, including a firebug like clone for developer tools, and forcing developers to now play ball by developing web compliant web sites.
However IE 8 is now pushing the web with starting to support HTML 5.0 specification, so that the back button does not break Ajax web sites, saving copies of web pages on disk while the browser is disconnected from the Internet so that if youre editing a blog page and your disconnected, the data will still save once connection resumes and their are even connect and disconnect events from the new HTML 5.0 spec.
Also new are web-slices and web actions. Web-slices allows the user to save parts of page as a bookmark and it shows a thumbnail of that part of a page so you could easily view your favorite eBay auction or status notices on facebook, without having to browse to the actual page.
Web actions allow the use to select any text into the page and send it a web services that uses that text as a query without having to open up a new page, and to the user it seems like a nice dialog popup. So you could highlight and address and get the Google maps location as a popup right in the page.