Jobyssey

Clare Dillon clued us in to a Silverlight Users Group meetup last night at the Odessa Club here in Dublin to watch the keynote address from Mix08. A lot of the Silverlight content was interesting but academic for us, as at the moment Jobyssey isn’t very multimedia heavy. Ray Ozzie’s discussion of the Software+Services model shed some light on the gameplan for Microsoft in the coming years (see a summary here), but it was Dean Hatchamovitch’s discussion of IE8 that really grabbed our attention.

IE8 is going to have a number of interesting new features, but it’s also to have a much heavier focus on improved interoperability than previous IE releases (see Microsoft’s summary of the standards changes here, and a detailed discussion of exactly which standards it will be compliant with here). Better compliance with CSS/ HTML standards will hopefully mean more consistent results with the use of float positioning and the like, and hopefully less cursing the heavens as we try to figure out why a page looks one way in IE7 and another in Firefox/Safari (in case you’re cursing the fact that your IE7 optimized pages will now display incorrectly, there’s support built in for that as well).

Welcome news, and long overdue. With various versions of IE currently commanding about 50% of market share, every page has to display well across recent IE releases as well as Firefox, and there’s really no good reason for there to be so many differences in functionality. Besides the aggravation of trying to ensure that users on different browsers are having similar experiences, there are a lot of cool things out there that aren’t supported in IE7, and it’s discouraging to keep opting out of things we think would improve the site to ensure that it is viewable for everyone. Hopefully change is around the corner, though.

Thanks again to Clare for the invite and to the Silverlight guys for having us- it was a fun night, and neat peek into new Microsoft web technologies.