I would love to tell you that I was able to install and test IE9 Platform 3 tonight. There seems to be a lot of good things in there (SVG improvements, canvas, audio, video) but the main problem is that it’s built on the fragile Windows stack. That’s not to say that other OS stacks aren’t fragile, but this is just tonight’s frustration.

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Happy Meal with extra cheese. Sony Vaio laptop.

Download and run iepreview.msi.

The installer downloads and tries to install KB2120976, KB2028560, KB2028551 first.

In the process of doing this, it aborts and says:

The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2739.

The failure window in the installation wizard has an “Installation Help” button. This button does nothing.

Thanks for the help!

Do a little sniffing around the web and find this page which tells me to run regsvr32 from an elevated command-line prompt to register the JScript DLL.

I do that.

Installer gives me the same exact error.

Then I decide to look at each one of the KB security patches. Each one tells me that I have to “Install the Genuine Windows Validation Component”. No matter what browser I try this in, it never seems to take – I always end up clicking on “Genuine Windows Validation, Alternate Method”. This gives me an .exe that I run that gives me a code to punch into a web form that tells Microsoft that I have a non-pirated copy of their software so I should be eligible to download software that will fix their software.

Right.

In each one of these patches, I get a dialog box that says

The update is not applicable to your computer

So this must be why the installer is failing, I guess? Maybe I could dig into why this problem is occurring, and hack around it. Let me just look at the source of the installer… oh wait…

So is this a broken installer? I’m not the only person who’s had this problem so far… go to the IEBlog announcement and search for ’2739′.

P.S. I also love how the IEBlog redesign doesn’t let me link to individual comments anymore.

P.P.S. I am really trying to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here, but c’mon…

I decided to go with my Solitaire demo because it was the most complete, didn’t infringe on any copyrights (looking at you Tetris), and most visually recognizable. It’s not the most innovative, but then again the point of this is not necessarily to win any prizes. It’s really about increasing awareness.

Unfortunately, the SVG (26kb) and JavaScript (16kb + 21kb) totaled 63kb. I did some cleanup of the SVG, minified the JS and then put the script inline with the SVG and then gzipped it. The result was a .svgz file that was 9kb. Perfect!

I then got an email from a friendly marketing/evangelism person at Microsoft who said that the engineers did not know how to open the svgz file to review the code to ensure it was under 10k. Woops! I explained to her that I thought it would be ok for the SVG to be gzipped, much as PNG/GIF files use compression and sent her the uncompressed SVG file for them to review. After all, SVG is just an image format, right?

Was I following the rules? Did Microsoft give me a fair shake? See for yourself. Who knows, maybe this is the first time a Microsoft admin had to figure out how to serve SVG on a Microsoft web server.

Out of curiosity, I later tried to see how far I was able to get down the Solitaire game: 5811 bytes. Not bad for a complete game that has scalable graphics. I’d be curios to see the equivalent SWF file.

I don’t expect you to vote for my entry, but what I do expect you to do is now go out and submit .SVGZ entries to the MIX 10k challenge. That one SVG entry is looking pretty lonely. If I can get Solitaire down to 5811 bytes, surely you can do better?

Thanks a lot to Amy, the evangelist/marketing person who really was quite patient with me.

I think you should do your best to make it to this conference. It’s Oct 2-4 in Mountain View, California (at the Google Crittenden Campus). So just register already. You don’t have much time.

We’ve got keynotes by Brad Neuberg of Google talking about the SVG Web project, Erik Dahsltröm of Opera and Sam Ruby. We’ve got talks on Raphaël, AmpleSDK, and dojo.gfx.

There will be panel discussions with Implementors (Mozilla, WebKit, Opera, and many others) and the SVG Working Group. There are separate sessions on SVG in Opera, in Mozilla, in Android.

There are talks about SVG usage in important web projects like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap as well as talks from tool makers such as Inkscape and OpenOffice.

If you have an extra day, consider attending the Workshops on the Monday to get some hands-on experience with toolkits (the afore-mentioned Raphaël and Dojo.gfx), tools (Inkscape) and animation (SMIL) among others.

And oh yeah, in case you missed it up top, I’ll say it again: Microsoft is sponsoring and will be attending! Microsoft has long been the sole hold-out among desktop browsers in supporting SVG. So while Opera, Mozilla and others have long been supporters of SVG – it’s Microsoft’s sponsorship and attendance that might be seen as an eyebrow-raising event. Let’s keep the speculation to a minimum, shall we?

But Microsoft has also publicly been “looking into” SVG for years and years, so I’m not going to hold my breath.

These days, Internet Explorer is the last browser I look at… as long as all my textual content is actually visible, then that’s just fine by me.

Making Flash-like visually “high-impact” (sorry about the marketing BS term) sites using the openly specified Web platform but without the Draconianness of XML in such a way that the whole thing uses retained-mode graphics and lives in one DOM for easy scripting (i.e. no need for scripts to deal with object or iframe sub-DOMs).

(link)

I guess that’s what I want… but more important to me than removing the “Draconianness of XML” is that I want this stuff to work in every major browser on every major platform. And no amount of specifying can guarantee that. It takes willingness of all participants. I use the term “participants” here in a broad sense, because based on the first IE8 Beta, it seems that Microsoft is not really working in close communication with the HTML Working and Web Application Formats Working Groups. The WG seems to be trapped in a constant state of reverse-engineering the things that Microsoft has done and sadly I don’t see this changing in the future.

Can an open specification really compete with a company that can throw gobs of money at developing a glitzy-but-proprietary standard, who then proceed to throw gobs and gobs of money at organizations to use that new standard? Further reading: Sam Ruby’s SVG Shiv.

Sorry, I guess that was my cheery thought for the day.

Good way to garner some praise just before MIX08. Now we wait with baited breath for later this week, when news from MIX08 about IE8′s support of other standards (beyond CSS2′s Acid) will percolate up into the blogosphere.

Prediction 1: Web Development As You Wanted It To Be In 2004

IE8′s “super standards” will include not only vastly improved CSS 2.1 support, but support for HTML DOM Level 2 and fixes to a great deal of IE7- interoperable bugs in its JS and HTML 4.01 (<object> implementation, for instance) implementations. In “super standards” mode, I should be able to write a decent web application from 2004 by following web standards without a huge amount of IE-specific hacks – as long as I include the <meta> tag.

Prediction 2: Little Bits of HTML 5

IE8′s will support some of the new features of HTML 5 (probably not <video> or <audio>, but perhaps <canvas> and the DOM interfaces). IE8 will automatically go into “super standards” upon encountering the HTML5 DOCTYPE (as Chris stated).

Prediction 3: Who Needs Demand?

IE8 will ship with the Silverlight plugin automatically enabled. This will certainly drive penetration of the plugin, since even standardistas will want to install IE8 to get the good stuff we wanted 4 years ago. Who needs demand?

Prediction 4: If You Want XHTML, Go For It

I might be going out on a limb here, but I think IE8 might just support XHTML 1.1 (the MIME type and the XML strictness). This doesn’t hurt Microsoft’s strategy, really – since I don’t think a large amount of people will be that interested in XML-based HTML. I think documents serving XHTML will automatically be in “super standards” mode. I also think that whatever bits of HTML5 they support, it will also be XHTML5 support.

Prediction 5: Sorry Shelley

IE8 will not support SVG. I really hope this one is not true, but I can’t see that it makes sense for them to ship with support for the XHTML+SVG (+MathML?) mixed namespace nirvana until Silverlight has penetrated further into the web. Maybe they’ll do it in IE9 when the Silverlight functionality is native (ok, that’s a prediction for IE9…)

Thoughts?

There are, of course, many many unanswered questions… For those who can’t be bothered to read my whole post, please see the main point. For others with patience,

First, the basics:

1. IE8 will render existing content in either “quirks mode” (without a DOCTYPE) or IE7′s “standard mode” (with a STRICT DOCTYPE)
2. IE8 will use “super standards” mode if it sees a <meta> tag with “IE=8″ (what “super standards” mode entails is not entirely clear yet, but it should mean substantial improvement to CSS support at a minimum – I’m keeping my fingers crossed for fully compliant HTML and DOM2 support as well)
3. IE6 and IE7 will dutifully ignore the <meta> tag

Now what the above means is that if you’ve got existing pages that work around IE’s poor support of standards today that you need do nothing in order for them to continue to work in IE8. If you want to start coding HTML 4.01 for IE8 that truly supports standards you either add the <meta> tag with “IE=8″ or update your web server to serve it to IE.

It looks like this solution was developed in coordination with the the Web Standards Project. This article describes in more detail the rationale and intracacies of the solution. Furthermore, they “hope other browser vendors join Microsoft in implementing this functionality”.

Second, there is, as usual, tons of wailing and moaning and predictions of a web apocalypse, with many people yammering that this tag should work in the opposite way (“super standards” mode should be default in IE8 and all existing web pages would need to be updated to include a tag if they want IE8 to use the old IE7 “standards” mode).

Unfortunately, this suggestion has the potential to break pages for users. Let’s say your page is doing browser sniffing and if it’s Internet Explorer, you’re going to use attachEvent() instead of the standards-compliant addEventListener() which all other browsers support. If IE8 supports addEventListener() and no longer supports the non-standard attachEvent(), then guess what: your page is broken in IE8 “super standards” mode. Of course, there hasn’t been any mention of DOM-support from the IEBlog yet, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Call me naïve, but I intend to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here and say this was the best possible solution in a very difficult situation. I believe opt-in is the only possible solution Microsoft could have for existing content (read: HTML4). Hear me out, there are some important facts that aren’t widely known yet:

4. If IE8+ sees the meta tag with “IE=edge”, it will always use its latest, bleeding edge standards support. This will be useful for those sites which have zero IE-specific hacks, though Microsoft does not recommend it.
5. If IE8 sees the meta tag with “IE=9″, it will do “best effort”, which means IE8′s “super standards” mode
6. And most importantly: if IE8 sees a not-yet-widely-deployed DOCTYPE (like HTML5′s), it will use “super standards mode”

This last one is a big deal to all the wailers out there. This means anyone coding to new standards (like the newly published draft of HTML5) will not have to use this meta tag. Let me repeat that: If you want to start coding in HTML5, then IE8 will not require any <meta> tag. Ian Hickson and Anne van Kesteren might not yet be aware of this.

Some final notes:

7. other browsers will likely ignore this new tag too (at least indications are that Mozilla and WebKit will not)
8. IE10 will need to support IE7- quirks mode, IE7- standards mode, IE7 super-standards mode, IE8 super-standards mode, IE9 super-standards mode and IE10 super-standards mode – WTF? Chris does explain that eventually IE7 mode will have to go away at some point many years in the future when the amount of content has dropped below some threshold…
9. No official word yet on whether IE8 will support XHTML and its MIME type (but if it did, this would be a new DOCTYPE and would not need any <meta> tag). A year and a half ago, Chris told Mary Jo that XHTML would probably not happen in IE8 – but that was a year and a half ago…
10. No word yet on whether IE8 will support SVG (again, if it did, no need for a special flag to indicate “super standards mode”)

So all in all, the story is not so bleak. As HTML5 becomes the defacto standard of the web, IE8+ will not require any <meta> tagginess. I think the IEBlog should post a follow-up explanation with some of these facts (and more disclosure about what will be included in “super standards” mode). I wonder why Chris chose to post this just before his birthday, it certainly made his day off less enjoyable – unless he gets a kick out of all the bitterness and vitriol…

This is great news and it was something I half-hoped/half-expected. Now that this is official, I also expect an announcement that IE8 will support the W3C DOM 1 and 2, including Events. With both of those, people can actually create web pages that function across all browsers with only the occasional workaround. Web pages from 2005, that is. Too bad the first browser Beta will ship sometime in 2008. Sorry IE Team, you have to understand that you’ll be continuing to receive these digs until the browser ships…

There are some great questions and answers here that I recommend you read.

There are bigger questions still looming. It is well-known, if you had been following Chris Wilson on the HTML WG mailing list in the summer, that IE8 will only support these improvements in a special “opt-in” standards mode.

At the moment, most browsers support two modes: A quirks mode and “standards mode”. The IE team found when IE7 was released with some new CSS fixes that a great deal of web pages were “broken” and they refuse to do that again to customers. This means that any new improvements will be in another mode that web authors will specifically have to opt-in.

Now there is a great deal of concern about this mode. Personally I suspected something like IE’s conditional comments, however this comment from Chris Wilson makes me doubt that earlier assumption. He said:

more detail on “IE8 standards mode” in a soon-to-come post. And I think other browser vendors already DO support the behavior of that mode.

Does he simply mean that the other browsers already support the standards and features that IE8 will? Or does he actually mean that other browsers support the mechanism of opt-in?

The former is not big news, but the latter can be cause for speculation and is really good news. Is he talking about the HTML5 DOCTYPE (<!DOCTYPE html>)? David Naylor thinks maybe so. Or could he be talking about XHTML and its associated MIME type (application/xhtml+xml)? Nah, I won’t go that far

Another question: Any support for SVG on the horizon for IE8? Now that Silverlight is trying to make its way into the web, would it be strategically good for Microsoft to add support for an open standard for web graphics? Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to add this feature in IE9+ to give XAML more time to nest? I certainly hope I’m wrong…

From the video:

• There was an interesting slip-up. The interviewer mentions something called “Triton” (he meant to say “Trident”, the rendering engine behind IE6 and IE7). The interviewer then slips in the fact that “Triton” is the codename for IE9 and that he’s going to leave that in the video (with Dean’s approval). Is “Triton” the name of the new engine? Does this mean that IE7 still uses Trident which now supports 3 modes of rendering? So much speculation…
• I’m also surprised that Chris and Dean both don’t know what the ‘X’ stands for in AJAX…