Bring It On

Having a richer UI than the HTML can provide while still keeping the great deployment model of HTML (or lack of, you don’t deploy anything) is what brought us semi-solutions like AJAX (helping in the interactivity department) and RIA platforms like Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight.

Actually, there was one sorta-kinda competitor here since the end of 2006: XBAP or XAML Binary Applications (at least I think that’s what it stands for). XBAP is a way to bring your WPF application into the browser. You get all the rich interactivity of WPF and simple deployability of Web based solution.

Except that the XBAP sucks, big time. It conforms to the .NET security model and naturally XBAP falls into the “Internet zone” which basically means nothing will work. In the end XBAP is useful in the Intranet scenarios and even there with a few issues.

When Silverlight (SL) 1.0 came out I was really looking forward to its successor, version 2.0 which was supposed to bring .NET CLR into the mix (SL version 2 beta 1 just came out a week ago). SL is a smaller subset of WPF and .NET with added benefit of a lot smaller download size and portability – runs inside all major browsers on Windows and Mac OS X (and even on Linux as soon as Mono guys finish the porting). SL uses different security model and thus is actually useful for (shocking) network-enabled Web applications. Microsoft almost ruined even SL – initially the plan wasn’t to have Socket support in the SL, but after many protests from developers Socket support is now present in 2.0 beta 1.

If you ask me, XBAPs are obsoleted by SL. In Intranet scenarios, I’d just use desktop WPF applications while for Internet scenarios SL is a way to go.

Additionally, Silverlight is revolutionary as it brings the .NET Framework into one other major platform besides Windows – Mac OS X.

Reading Slashdot one could safely assume that Microsoft is the root of all evil on earth. But to think that Microsoft’s power (pun intended) extends to the other worlds… I didn’t see this one coming.

The screenshot to the right shows what the spelling checker of Firefox 2 (on Windows, oh the irony) thinks of the most excellent Windows scripting/administration shell called Powershell. Powers hell? No wonder Microsoft is as successful financially

When it was revealed that IE 8 is indeed in the making a couple of months ago, the news of the day was the improvements Microsoft has made to IE regarding standard compliance.

Theoretically, things were going great: Microsoft passed the ACID 2 test demonstrating quite a big step up from the IE 7. For years Microsoft has been catching up with the Web standards, but the pace of the progress has been slow. Each new version of IE after and including version 6 was just a bit more compliant. Passing ACID test was supposed to demonstrate that IE 8 will in fact be sufficiently standards compliant so that Web developers can finally code once, deploy everywhere (for more on the different modes of browser behavior see Wikipedia page on “quirks mode”.)

Or so it seemed. The problem at the time of the original IE 8 announcement was the way the standard behavior of the browser was supposed to be triggered. Due to the large number of Web sites that still target broken “standards” mode of older IE versions, Microsoft decided to introduce a new meta tag with which a developer would opt-in to the “really really standards mode”. Thus, by default, the IE 8 would behave the same as IE 7, which in a way defeats the purpose of the real standards mode and would most likely slow down the adoption of the standard compliant pages.

The decision to go with the IE 7 standards mode by default resulted in a huge backlash from developers. Basically by doing this Microsoft introduced yet another special case that a web developer has to think about. If the IE 8 was in the standards compliant mode by default and judging by the level of the standards compliance of both Safari 3 and Firefox 3 it looked like web developers could finally stop conditionally styling the pages, which is a huge win for everyone.

Then a great thing happened. During this years’ MIX conference Microsoft announced that IE 8 will in fact by default do things the right way. If a developer wanted to get a IE 7 “standards” mode it had to explicitly say via a meta tag, so the situation is a reverse of what it used to be. To rectify the cases where a developer didn’t say anything, the web site was targeting IE 7 and therefore looked bad in IE 8, Microsoft added an “Emulate IE7” button featured very prominently in the main toolbar.

We can only speculate what motivated Microsoft to make such a change. Some think that increased pressure from various lawsuits in Europe and particularly complaints by Opera about the need for Microsoft to increase IE’s standard compliance was a main driver. Some think that it was simply a part of the overall Microsoft strategy to open up. Some think Microsoft actually listened to customer feedback.

Whatever it is I am grateful. Even though I do not do much Web work, what I did do was often an exercise in pain trying to align the look & feel across major browsers.

Here’s to hoping that by the end of this year one will have very reasonable standards support across all major browsers  and that the compatibility nightmare will finally be over.