September, 2011

The Web is more interactive, fun, and immersive when sites work well with new input devices and touch screens. The Windows Developer Preview introduces support for handling touch and pen input in your sites and apps. Developers can now ensure their sites work well with touch and build powerful new experiences that make the most of advanced input such as multi-touch and gestures. You can see this in action on the IE Test Drive site in the new and updated demos Touch Effects , Lasso Birds , and Flying...

Asynchronous patterns are becoming more common and more important to moving web programming forward. They can be challenging to work with in JavaScript. To make asynchronous (or async) patterns easier, JavaScript libraries (like jQuery and Dojo) have added an abstraction called promises (or sometimes deferreds). With these libraries, developers can use promises in any browser with good ECMAScript 5 support. In this post, we’ll explore how to use promises in your web applications using XMLHttpRequest2...

With the new IE10 engine included in the Windows Developer Preview , developers can work with more HTML5 technologies to build touch-friendly and beautiful interactive Web applications. This video shows some of the touch-friendly HTML5 technologies in the third IE10 Platform Preview, included with the Windows Developer Preview. Windows 8 includes one HTML5 browsing engine that powers two browsing experiences: the new Metro style browser and IE10 on the desktop. The common HTML5 engine provides...

Users expect their Web sites and apps to work well even when the network isn't available. With data increasingly stored in the cloud, developers want to enable fluid experiences that allow access to data when there is no connectivity; when devices are disconnected from the network or when they encounter dead spots in coverage. In this post, we show how to create well-behaved offline sites and apps using the following HTML5 features: AppCache to store file resources locally...

IE10 in the Windows Developer Preview introduces support for hardware-accelerated CSS3 text-shadow . Text-shadow is one of the top requested features from Web developers. It enables text effects that were previously difficult or impossible to accomplish in a standards-friendly way without resorting to inline images of text. Text-Shadow in IE10 As its name suggests, text-shadow is a CSS property that draws a shadow behind text. Example of a purple text-shadow behind text Use...

The Web gets richer and developers are more creative when sites and services can communicate and send notifications in real-time. WebSockets technology has made significant progress over the last nine months. The standards around WebSockets have converged substantially, to the point that developers and consumers can now take advantage of them across different implementations, including IE10 in Windows 8. You can try out a WebSockets test drive that shows real time, multiuser drawing that works across...

SVG Open 2011 , the 9th International Conference on Scalable Vector Graphics, is just over two weeks away. This year’s theme, “Where SVG Meets the Web,” underscores SVG’s inclusion in HTML5 and its growing importance on the Web. SVG is also the declarative vector graphics format for Windows 8 Metro style apps built using HTML . The conference is an annual showcase of SVG innovation bringing together the leaders who drive SVG forward. Microsoft is honored to host this year’s conference at our New...

Today, the W3C announced the creation of a Tracking Protection Working Group to work on defining what tracking is, signaling user intent, and tracking protection lists. The W3C’s action here can help protect consumers from unwanted tracking. We welcome the opportunity to work with the industry and governments on a Web standard based on our earlier work. The Tracking Protection feature in IE9 provides a way for consumers to benefit today by restricting which sites on the Web get information from...