One of the aspects I enjoy more about my job is the opportunity to travel around the world and meet different audiences: developers, designers, devigners, enthusiasts, business managers, CIO, CTO, CSO…and the list can go and on for a while (reminder: list the most funny job titles in a separate post).

Everywhere I went recently, the feedback has been consistent: “I love IE9”!

I still remember the HTML5 MeetUp in Auckland, back in September 2009, where I showed some of the new HTML5 features already available in Internet Explorer 8 and had an interesting conversation with Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla and his team about the complexity of adopting web standards and an unified video codec. The conversations about IE8 and the future of HTML5 continued in the following weeks in Europe , when I met the Edge User Group in London and the German community at the Tech Ed in Berlin.

Later during the year our President Steven Sinofsky shared at PDC for the first time our work in progress with Internet Explorer 9, showcasing the hardware accelerated HTML5 parser and the new JavaScript engine “Chakra”. I remember sitting in the audience and hearing people “happy-crying” for such an unexpected announcement.

The engineering team spent the winter checking-in lot of beautiful code into IE9, releasing the first IE9 Platform Preview to the public during the MIX conference, in March ‘10. New JavaScript engine, SVG inline support, partial support for several CSS3 modules…everything hardware accelerated. And for the first time a set of demos designed to show the new features and scenarios available with IE9. And that was just the beginning…

We quickly received very positive feedbacks, people started testing the Preview and submitting bugs. It’s when I presented at the Geek Meet with Robert Nyman in Sweden that I heard for the first time a feedback that is very popular these days:

“Please bring back IE9 to the MAC OS!”

Eheh, I wasn’t expecting to hear that to be honest – but it was great to see IE love among all these white machines…

At the beginning of May we shipped the Platform Preview #2, completing several of the SVG modules and adding support for CSS3 functionalities as well as increased performance. On the same day I was sitting next to Brendan, Douglas, Charles and Alex at the Web 2.0 Expo – in an…animated panel about the future of browsers in the next five years. The dear Dion kicked-off the panel asking me about the Canvas tag. Lol. Straight answer. The conversation quickly evolved to the future and the several opportunities and challenges that browser implementers (and eventually web developers) will need to face with the transition to HTML5. Moreover many people agreed on the fast-track progress of IE9 and how Microsoft is working close with the W3C Working Groups to move the specification forward.

Back to SF the week later, I met a large audience of Java developers at the HTML5 MeetUp in San Francisco. Next to my session, Brad Neuberg (Web Advocate from Google) did a nice presentation, showing a mix of W3C HTML5 and vendor-experimental features running in the browser. Everyone loved HTML5 on that day. Even my friend Brad, that very kindly shared a lovely feedback about IE9 with the audience. Thanks Brad!

“I love what IE9 is doing with HTML5” (Brad Neuberg, Google Web Advocate)

Even if it is summer and it is still raining in Seattle, I’ve been really enjoying myself in the last months. It’s great to share our excitement about IE9 and see all of your (either positive or negative, as long as they are constructive) feedbacks around the globe. And the best thing is that we are not done yet!

What’s coming next?

Next week I will be back to my Italy, where I will have the pleasure to talk at the ReMIX keynote. Per voi fortunati italiani che verrete a Milano, aspettatevi di vederne delle belle! A presto!!

In a previous post I talked about Expression Web SuperPreview, a tool that facilitate the “cross-browsers” testing.

We received tons of positive feedbacks about this tool and several feature requests. One of the most popular was the ability to include additional browsers and platforms…so here you are :-)

Expression Web 4 SuperPreview allows you to easily preview how your site would look like on Safari on MAC, through an online service that will take care of the processing/rendering on your behalf!. We now also allow you to preview the site using the “original” IE7 engine (7) and the “emulated” IE7 engine which is part of IE8 (IE 8 –> 7) or using the latest build of Firefox (3.5.8).

More information on the Expression website. You can download a trial here.

From the Apple website:

Every new Apple mobile device and every new Mac — along with the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser — supports web standards including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. These web standards are open, reliable, highly secure, and efficient. They allow web designers and developers to create advanced graphics, typography, animations, and transitions. Standards aren’t add-ons to the web. They are the web. And you can start using them today.

I’m not a marketing guy. My mind beats “developer, developer, developer”. And as a developer, I can’t stop thinking that this pop-up is very sad.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great for Apple to promote their browser. Everyone has a preference. At least, I do :-)

BUT – it’s sad to see that the demo that they are claiming are built on HTML5 web standards don’t run on any browser, but Safari.

What is a web standard?

Can a browser that render well a website with browser specific code and markup (for instance, using 177 vendor prefix extensions in just one CSS file) and prevent you from seeing it in other browsers (*) claim to support “web standards”?

I’m scared by this trend to call “open, reliable, secure and efficient” any new work in progress over the W3C Specifications. Browser vendors have a big responsibility, which is not demonstrating how quickly their developers can write code over night.

Web browsers should render the same markup – the same HTML, same CSS, and same script – the same way. That’s simply not the case today. Enabling the same markup to work the same across different browsers is crucial for HTML5’s success.

What do you think?

Update 11:29 – (*) As expected, playing with Fiddler and Developer tools to change the User Agent, the Apple HTML5 site (purified by Safari-specific markup and code) looks equally awful on Firefox, Chrome, Opera and IE. Not exactly the goal of W3C with HTML5…