Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit
How do I make my site ‘light up’ with Internet Explorer 8?
Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit
Looks like IE8 is knocking off all the standard, next-release browser stuff, weighing in with cross-domain requests, DOM storage and a selector API. HTCs are still there (hooray?). No word on conditional comments or compilation, but I’d guess they would have publicized taking them out.
Some new things:
- Opening up the pipeline to six requests per server: thanks, because the old 2-requests per really hurts!
- Building in online- and offline-detection right in the browser: I’d imagine this will hook into the Silverlight offline API somehow someday. It kind of mitigates the need for something like Google Gears when coupled with DOM storage, too.
- “AJAX navigation”: this looks to be a way of maintaining state in an application by writing directly to the history hash. Really, really nice if they’ve done this. For example, I go to a page, click a tab and the tab loads Ajax-ically. I can then update the browser’s address bar showing the new tab and store this new location in history, letting me bookmark the tab or, later on, jump back with a click of the back button. Entire libraries have popped up trying to handle this state management, and here’s a solution that does it in the browser. Could be powerful stuff.
- Cross-IFRAME requests: Paul Irish and I had a discussion on this last week. IE8 has an API built for it, rendering a bunch of that hackery moot as IE has built an API around it.
IE8 is looking like a blend of catching up, fixing bugs, and innovating. I really like some of the features they’re putting in, but, until other browsers have them, they’re introducing another non-standard way of doing things. But, like innerHTML or XMLHTTPRequest, maybe they’ll help standardize things a bit.
Tags: ie8
