October, 2011

Building fast and functional sites is a challenge with which most Web developers are familiar. Loading a new page every time the user clicks a link is slow. Fetching all content dynamically effectively disables the back button. Working with hashes is better, but still not ideal. Internet Explorer 10 in the Windows Developer Preview eliminates the compromise by adding support for HTML5 History . The pushState , replaceState , and popstate APIs provide fine-grained control over the behavior of the...

Vendor prefixes enable Web developers to experiment with new standards before they reach the Candidate Recommendation stage. I previously wrote how these prefixes are also a mechanism browser vendors use for handling timing conflicts between implementations and specifications. In building demos of new features for our IE Test Drive site and in various presentations, many of us on the IE team deal extensively with vendor prefixes. This blog post describes a pattern we’ve used in some recent demos...

Web graphics in SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format offer better quality display over a broader range of device sizes compared to bitmap-based graphics. SVG also has inherent accessibility making it the best choice for interactive graphics and those involving text. SVG usage on the Web continues to grow. Last week at SVG Open 2011 , we had the opportunity to meet with and hear from Web developers putting SVG to use in a wide variety of real-world applications. These applications include...

Windows 8 Metro style apps let developers take their Web sites’ experiences to the next level. With Metro style apps, developers can build experiences that are more immersive, beautiful, and better connected with other apps and the rest of Windows. Apps can utilize the Windows Runtime to deliver features beyond what’s possible in a browser alone such as seamless access to local files and folders, integrating with Windows 8 Charms for sharing and search, and interacting with locally-connected...

Touch interaction with Web sites and apps has the opportunity to improve their usability and ubiquity as the Web and Windows 8 Metro style apps play a key role on tomorrow’s touch-enabled devices. This post explains how Web developers can use the new IE10 pointer event model along with the iOS touch event model and the W3C mouse event model (as extended ) to create a cross-browser, common-code handler for pointer, touch, and mouse input. A little background: I’m fortunate to have...

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) provides Web developers with a declarative, markup-based language for building rich, interactive content as part of their Web sites. With SVG Filter Effects, supported in IE10 in the Windows Developer Preview, developers have a collection of powerful, image-based effects that apply to all SVG elements. Like all Web page content in IE9, SVG Filter effects in IE10 are built with hardware-accelerated rendering, resulting in stunning performance and opening up new opportunities...

The promise of HTML5 is a Web that works for everyone. Media accessibility through captioning is an important part of that promise and an area that is still emerging through standards work. Using the proposed HTML5 track element , developers can add captioning to HTML5 video by pointing to a caption file that contains a written representation of the dialog or actions in the video. Once the standards for captioning converge, there will be less need for external add-ons to publish accessible video...

The October 2011 Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer is now available via Windows Update . This security update resolves eight privately reported vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. The most severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. An attacker who successfully exploited any of these vulnerabilities could gain the same user rights as the local user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer...

Internet Explorer 10 in the Windows Developer Preview introduces two new CSS features designed to make it easier for developers to create rich text-centric Web pages and apps. CSS3 Regions provides a lightweight mechanism to flow content through multiple non-contiguous areas. IE10’s support of CSS3 Hyphenation gives developers a simple mechanism to hyphenate text in a wide range of languages. These two new features complement other great CSS features we previously announced , including CSS3 Grid...