Anthony Milner

The IE team at Microsoft are beavering away at the next version of Internet Explorer – version 8. For many years the IE team have been criticised by the wider web community for not producing standards compliant browsers. Chris Wilson the IE platform architect at Microsoft spoke at the Web Directions South Conference in September 2007. I have a great deal of respect for this guy. He stood up at a standardistas conference packed to the rafters with people who regularly use “Microsoft” and “Evil” in the same sentence and stated the case for IE and standards.

He talked about the challenges of supporting standards without breaking the web and ensuring that we maintain backwards and forwards compatibility in the real world. He also said that the next version of IE there would be a huge investment in standards compliance and we’re now seeing early evidence of this with the news that IE8 has passed the Acid2 test. Acid2 is a test page, written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for Web and related standards in their products and displays the “Hello World” smiley (pictured above) on successful implementation. Bruce Lawson, Accessibility Task Force Member at the Web Standards Project had this to say…

Blimey. Cor luvvaduck and no mistake. Just after the announcement that Opera are complaining to the European Union about Internet Explorer’s dodgy standards support, Chris Wilson reports that an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test.

For more information, check out the IE blog and watch the Channel9 vid

It’s not every day you get to learn about IE directly from the platform architect of IE so this was definitely a highlight.

MS championed standards in the mid 90’s. Chris Wilson worked on the Windows and Mac versions of Mosaic and has been involved in the development of every version of IE. He provided experimental support for CSS in IE3 which was a critically important step in the evolution of CSS.

Notes from his talk….

Challenges that we collectively face in moving the web forward…

Not here to talk about IE next features, release date or name

Where did we start – the original vision – it should be really simple to create and serve content

Web was driven by the need to interconnect i.e. hyper linking, not folder structure

Another Web 2.0 definition [I like this one]…

caring about the quality of web UI

Social experiences make the web immersive, we’re connecting people to people, not just information

3 types of people – Web developers, browser vendors and users

Wed dev is painful – non standards compliance developing for opera, ie6 hacks, ie7 breaks

The deployed browser base is a problem – Browser share is inconsistent – no consistent target to develop for.

Life as a Browser vendor is pure bliss NOT

Security is hard and will always be the top priority. Exploits target complex interactions

Trustworthy browsing means protecting the user against fraud which is why they built in a phishing filter to IE7

Don’t break the web – you can’t shut off access to legacy content

IE has over half a billion users. If we break the web and it affects 1% of users this equates to 10000 packed auditoriums that we’re sitting in.

Developers got used to the IE6 broken behaviour and baked it into the pages which caused a lot of problems when upgrading. People assumed IE 7 was broken but actually the hacks were breaking it

The big questions is “how to support standards without breaking the web”

Where is our common ground between the competing user base – Leave the web better than we found it.

Define “better”…

1. Secure
2. Stable
3. Interoperable
4. Performant
5. Powerful (features and functionality)

Secure is difficult in a world of complex relationships and trust interactions

Security is everyone’s problem

There are increased attack vectors with AJAX – code sharing, proxying and script inclusions requires trust

Have a security model for your code

Privacy – Aggregation of user information without user consent is a problem (privacy is not just cookies)

Syndications and mashups are catalysts for privacy issues – Apps and services need privacy models

Stability – if web apps don’t work consistently across all browsers people won’t depend on them

Compatability rules – if a page works in 1 version of a browser it must work in the next version.

To hit 90% of the market you need to test on IE6,7 and FF 2.0 and 1.5

MS supports browsers for 7 years after release.

Standards mode is increasingly popular 50% of the top 200 websites in the US run in standards mode

Quirks mode no longer protects compatibility because a lot of the web is in standards mode

Interoperable – the standards need to reflect reality and ambiguities need to be stamped out. We need to work together to define standards.

The goals is not to have a standard, the goal is to have interoperability

MS is working on the next version of IE and MS are committed to standards

A big part of the investment in IE7 (after security) was standards

MS recognise that their underlying assumptions of what the web is being used for needs to change in a web 2.0 world

With IE.Next there is a huge investment in a layout engine using the CSS 2.1 standard

Web 2.0 is evolution not revolution – don’t break the web | we must be backwards and forward compatible

The Goal

leave the web better than we found it