After leaving much of the creation of a new version of HTML to Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla, Microsoft has begun sinking its teeth into the Web standard.
The move adds clout to the effort to renovate HyperText Markup Language, the standard used to describe Web pages, which last was formally updated in 1999. In a mailing list posting on Friday, the software giant offered a host of questions and concerns with the present proposal.
"As part of our planning for future work, the IE team is reviewing the current editor's draft of the HTML5 spec and gathering our thoughts. We want to share our feedback and discuss this in the working group," said Internet Explorer Program Manager Adrian Bateman in the message. "I will post our notes as we collect them so we can iterate on our thinking more quickly. At this stage we have more questions than answers, but I believe that discussing them in public is the best way to make progress."
HTML 5 in its current draft form includes a number of significant advancements, notably several that make the Web a better foundation for applications, not just static Web pages. Among the present HTML 5 features are built-in video and audio, the ability to store data on a local computer to enable use of Web applications even when offline, Web Workers that can perform computational chores in the background without bogging down Web application responsiveness, Canvas for creating sophisticated two-dimensional graphics, and drag-and-drop for better Web application user interfaces.
... Read more
The E-mail Standards Project is urging Twitter users to pressure Microsoft to support better HTML formatting in Outlook.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Dave Greiner was distressed in 2007 when Microsoft decided to use Microsoft Word's relatively rudimentary technology to display HTML-encoded e-mail in Outlook. Now, facing the extension of that choice into the forthcoming Office 2010, he's agitating more loudly for change.
Greiner, a member of the informal E-mail Standards Project group, set up a Web site called FixOutlook.org and urged everybody who agrees with his position to publicize their dismay on Twitter; more than 19,000 did so by Wednesday afternoon.
Microsoft, while encouraging feedback on the matter, stood by its decision in a response published on the Microsoft Office Team blog.
... Read more
- prev
- 1
- next
