There are some innovative features in IE 9 that I had previously been extremely excited about. These are mostly regarding the browser’s integration with the operating system (especially Windows 7), which is something that Microsoft is in a unique position to provide in an efficient manner.

Some of these features are enabled through a JavaScript interface window.external. While this was all well and good, I previously had concerns with this as I had not been made aware of a method of detecting whether or not the features were available in the browser the page was being rendered by. This clearly would cause problems on multiple browsers, and you can’t just go around executing scripts for a single browser as this will cause errors in all the others. There is, however, a section on the MSDN documentation for this browser feature which describes how to perform a test to see if the browser supports the Pinned Sites feature.

The more serious issue I had was with the descriptions for various Pinned Sites features which required the use of Meta tags with extremely long property names to describe to the browser the various images, URLs and options the developer wanted. My point was that there are other technologies available in the HTML 5 specification which would be more suited to this, such as the HTML manifest (which is already used to specify options for sites such as client-side file caching, storage and other bits and pieces). According to the team, they decided to use the meta tags as it would be error-free cross browser, and it is not unstable like they claim the manifest specification is which may risk breaking the feature if the spec changes.

Many thanks to my friend Giorgio from the IE 9 team who was able to clear up these issues and provide the Microsoft team’s perspective on them.

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I had high hopes for IE 9.

In fact, I was quite looking forward to it. The Platform Previews worked very well, and I was pleased that HTML 5 was finally at the forefront of the platform. Hardware acceleration was nice, the video situation wasn’t great but I was prepared to let it slide, and everything seemed to be going better than expected.

Then the Beta landed. The user interface was something unexpected! Nice minimalist header, single box at the top, not too many buttons and some really nice features integrated with Windows 7. Now you could set up jump lists, make it so a tab can be pinned to the taskbar, and customise the theme of the browser when that pinned link is opened. You can tie in to Jump Lists; add custom buttons to the previews that popup from the taskbar; and a few other nifty little features.

But that’s where the cool stops. Because despite Microsoft finally jumping on the standards bandwagon, providing standard APIs and implementations we might be able to rely on, I was then shown the code which performs all of the “cool” functionality I mentioned earlier. Abused Meta tags. Proprietary JavaScript APIs. Recommendations for using non-standard icon sizes.

It seems all of this stuff has been implemented in the most hacky way possible. Which is a nightmare. Out goes cross-browser compliance, out goes standard JavaScript APIs – Microsoft have invented their own little language extension and are going to force it on everybody. It reminds me of the “OpenXML format is 100% free and open”, “So what does this tag contain, which is defined in the spec as ‘Contains a blob of binary data used for rendering a OneNote snippet’ with no more information” debate when Office 2007 and OpenXML all happened.

<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Archive;action-uri=http://www.thewayithink.co.uk/archive.aspx;icon-uri=http://www.thewayithink.co.uk//themes/arthemia/images/favicon.ico" />

That is just not on.

So my hope would have been that Microsoft used something more sensible, for example the HTML 5 Application Manifest for which this kind of thing was designed rather than the archaic and frankly incorrect abuse of Meta tags. I am also yet to see mention of a way to detect whether the browser supports the JavaScript calls (which are also disgustingly named) or not. Mmm, compliant. Not.

Thanks to everyone who came to my Reading Geek Night presentation about IE 9 and HTML 5 last night!

It was a pleasure talking to you all, and hopefully you got something out of the evening.

All my slides on the night were powered by HTML 5, so I have zipped them up (minus the space shuttle launch video – it was HD so quite a big file) and they are now available to download below.

Hopefully catch up with you all at an event soon!

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