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Thursday, March 13, 2008 : 1040 Hrs
Sci. & Tech.
Internet Explorer aims to embrace the web again
GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE
By Tim Anderson
Microsoft's next version of its browser will use web standards by default - but
questions remain over other key technologies
Deep in the bowels of a Las Vegas hotel, a smiley face and the words "Hello
World" display on a web page. Applause breaks out. The page is called the Acid2
Browser Test, and the web browser is a preview of Internet Explorer 8,
presented by its platform architect, Chris Wilson. "Thank you from the bottom of
my heart," says a member of the audience. More applause.
This was the scene at last week's Mix08 conference, where Microsoft showed
around 3,000 web designers and developers its latest internet technology. The
Acid2 page (webstandards.org/action/acid2/) was created by the Web Standards
Project to test whether a browser conforms to the official standards for
describing
page layout, mainly focusing on cascading style sheets (CSS).
The reason for the applause is twofold. First is that until now Microsoft's web
browser, used by 75% of those surfing the net, has never been close to passing
the test. Second, Internet Explorer's poor standards compliance causes
significant extra work for web designers.
When users navigate to a web page, they expect it to look and work the same
irrespective of which browser or operating system they use. Achieving this is
hard, since different browsers display the same page differently, with IE often
the worst offender. Web developers now hope for a time when they do not
have to insert conditional code to account for these differences, but can
deliver one standard page to all browsers.
Eric Meyer, an independent CSS expert, told this reporter: "CSS support in IE8
looks thus far to be very, very promising. It's very important, because the
level of CSS support in IE7 and IE6 has served as a brake on advanced CSS
adoption by authors, limiting them to less advanced techniques and
capabilities."
Internet Explorer has a curious history. There were six new versions between
1995 and 2001, the time of the "browser wars" with Netscape. Then the war was
over, Microsoft had won, and it didn't release another major version of its
browser for five years - long enough for it to become thoroughly out-of-date.
IE's CSS implementation fell far behind that of other popular browsers. In late
2006 Microsoft released IE7, which fixed some problems but still lagged
behind its rivals. "Differences between browsers simply waste too much
developer time," said Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager for IE,
speaking
at the Mix08 keynote, but not mentioning the extent which Microsoft itself
created the problem.
I asked Hachamovitch, who has led the Explorer team since 2003, why it has
taken Microsoft so long to address these deficiencies. "It comes down to what
we were doing with our time," he said. "Between 2001 and 2003 we were building
what you experience now as Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight."
These technologies display not HTML, the language of web pages, but XAML,
Microsoft's proprietary code for creating rich visual content. "In 2003 and 2004
we were making IE secure," he continues, referring to the work that went into
the security-focused Windows XP Service Pack 2. Security remained the theme
in IE7.
The dilemma is that fixing bugs introduces compatibility problems. "You can't
just flick a switch and have all the browsers in the world change, or have
all the servers and services in the world change," says Hachamovitch. The
consequence is that some websites look worse than before, because they detect
that IE is accessing them and deliver content that takes into account its
presumed peculiarities.
Microsoft's answer is to build "compatibility modes" into IE8. The manner in
which it does this is controversial. "Our decision was: do we default to the
IE7 compatible mode, or do we default to the better standards mode? The
experience we had releasing IE7 was that web developers were very slow to modify
their sites. We want to keep the web working," says Hachamovitch.
Microsoft initially announced that IE8 would behave by default like IE7. Page
designers would have to include special code to turn on IE8's standards support.
This decision was greeted with a hail of protest, because it might perpetuate a
non-standard web. Earlier this month, Hachamovitch announced that Microsoft
had changed its mind. "We've decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web
content in the most standards compliant way it can," he wrote on the official
Explorer blog.
Why the change of heart? Apparently the key was a separate strategic
announcement in February this year, covering what Microsoft calls
interoperability
principles and promising "open connections to its products, support for
industry standards and data portability." According to Hachamovitch, "I read
through
the interoperability principles and I started discussing them with other senior
people in the company. It didn't take that long. We have a more interoperable
way, we have a more compatible way."
It sounds good, but Hachamovitch's warmth begins to fade when I broach the
vexed subject of browser scripting. The context is important. Hachamovitch had
already stated that Microsoft spent three years neglecting IE for the sake of a
more proprietary technology, which is now appearing on the web as a browser
plug-in called Silverlight. This is similar in some ways to Adobe's Flash, and
supports rich multimedia effects within web pages, as well as the ability
to run applications written in Microsoft's .NET Framework.
Silverlight and Flash applications in effect bypass the browser. Web standards
advocates are wary of them, because they replace the open web with content
that depends on a proprietary plugin. The Mozilla Foundation, creator of the
cross-platform Firefox browser, prefers to upgrade the capabilities of the
browser itself. A key component of this is JavaScript, the programming language
that runs in the browser and which is standardised by ECMA, the European
standards body, under the name ECMAScript. Mozilla is keen to see the current
JavaScript upgraded to a far more powerful version called ECMAScript 4.0.
"Why do we care about ECMAScript 4.0? The answer is that JavaScript is the
language of the net. We want to keep pushing that technology forward to make
it easier for people to build bigger, faster, more secure web sites," Mozilla's
vice president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer, told me.
I asked Hachamovitch if Microsoft will implement ECMAScript 4.0. He
prevaricates, talking about competing demands on the IE development team, and
saying:
"Right now there isn't really an ECMAScript 4 offering to implement, there is
an ECMAscript for discussion."
On the ECMAScript standardisation committee, Microsoft has apparently been
stalling, coming up with last-minute counter proposals instead of advancing the
4.0 standard. "Sometimes you get political arguments veiled in technical
arguments," says Schroepfer. Is it possible that Microsoft is stifling the
advancement
of JavaScript in order to promote programming within Silverlight instead? I put
this to Schroepfer, who says: "I don't know the intentions, I'd rather
focus on the actions and say, why can't we work together to take the
technologies that have worked on the web for 10 years and move them forward, to
the
benefit of everyone?"
The conversation shows that while Microsoft is clearly serious about
implementing better web standards in IE8, the battle for control over which
technology
dominates the web is not over yet.
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