Will’s Blog

The IE Team have just announced the availability of Beta 1 of IE8 for developers. You can read more about that on their blog.

Obviously as a web developer, the mind immediately turns to “so, what’s in it for me?”.

Picked up the following points from an MSDN Doc on what’s new for IE8:

• Accessibility
  • No more “alt” for image alternate text/tooltip. So use title or longdesc instead.
• ActiveX
  • Per-Site ActiveX - Permission to allow ActiveX controls to run on a site-by-site basis.
  • Non-Admin install – Allows non-admin users to install ActiveX controls to their user profiles (no UAC).
• Activities & WebSlices
  • Services
  • WebSlices
• Ajax Enhancements
  • Ajax Navigation – Allows browser back button to work when doing ajax based navigation.
  • XMLHttpRequest Enhancements
    • Connection timeout (read/write) property
    • ontimeout event
  • Max Concurrent Connections default changed from 2 to 6. You can change the registry to get this for current versions of IE.
    In IE8, a developer has access to the following JavaScript properties: window.maxConnectionsPerServer and window.maxConnectionsPerServer_01 (both read only)

  • Changed window.navigator.onLine behaviour from being a user-set (File -> Work Offline) global “offline”, to now indicating whether a user is connected to a network.
    Also, new events onOffLine and onOnLine.

  • Cross Domain Request (XDR) – A new object introduced, XDomainRequest. From the MSDN page – “allow restricted and secure communication between untrusted modules in the page. The browser shields the user from potential threats while allowing powerful cross-site interaction. “

  • Cross Document Messaging based on postMessage. From MSDN Page – “allows cooperative text exchange between untrusted modules from different domains embedded within a page.”

• CSS

  • data:URI - Allows one to embed small data resources (eg: small images). Here’s an example.

  • Floats – Several fixes and hasLayout removed from IE8.

  • Margin Collapsing now complies with CSS2.1

  • New :before, :after and :focus pseudo classes, with associated content attribute. Also see w3c article on CSS 2.1 Generated Content and Selectors.

  • outline.

  • Printing Changes

    • page-break-inside

    • widows attribute

    • orphans

  • CSS Table Layout enhancements.

  • text-decoration now conforms to CSS 2.1.

  • border-spacing

  • caption-side

  • Counters & Numbering – counter-reset, counter-increment.

  • Support for CSS3 Ruby Module. Mainly used for East Asian documents for pronunciation/short annotation purposes. Pretty cool, especially for those asian language learning sites.

  • Additional list-style-type values.

  • white-space

  • z-index

• Developer Tools

  • CSS Tool

  • Light-Weight Script Debugger

  • Version Mode switching.

• Document Compatability Mode

• DOM Storage - aka Client-side session and persistent storage

• Protected Mode Cookies

• Selectors API

• Tab Isolation & Concurrency – Improves performance/reliability of IE 8. So if a page in one tab hangs, the others are still usable.

Oh, and IE8 Whitepapers.

And finally, for those who want to try IE8 with no risks, you can download a Virtual PC image with IE8 from here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 11:22 am and is filed under Ajax, General, JavaScript, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.