Webware

LAS VEGAS--Microsoft offered its first public demonstration of Internet Explorer 8 on Wednesday, a prospect that had general manager Dean Hachamovitch struggling to figure out what to cover.

"I'm so excited that I had to figure out how to focus," he told the crowd. The marketing folks naturally suggested he point to three major advances, but Hatchamovitch disagreed.

"These are developers," he said he told the marketers. "They can count higher than three."

So, instead he said he would talk about eight features: CSS 2.1 support, CSS Certification, performance, start of HTML 5 support, new developer tools, activities, Web slices and one he hasn't named yet.

Microsoft also said that the first beta of the browser, intended for developers, will be available after today's keynote.

One of the new features, WebSlices, allow users to break a Web site into parts and only get updates from the part they want.

In IE 8 users can subscribe to parts of Web page," Hachamovitch said. He showed an example in IE 8 where users can use Web slices to subscribe to a single eBay auction.

Apple has its own Web-clipping subscription method that is part of Mac OS X.

Separately, Microsoft said it was making available a beta version of Silverlight 2, which will move the technology further beyond delivering video and into creating rich Internet applications.

Among the features of Silverlight 2 is what Microsoft calls adaptive streaming: the ability of the client PC to decide how large a streaming file it can handle at any given moment based on its CPU and network resources.

"If the network gets congested it can drop down to a lower bit rate," said Scott Guthrie a vice president in Microsoft's developer division.

With IE8, Hachamovitch discussed Microsoft's commitment to compatibility. He relayed a story of what his kids used to say whenever they had Internet problems.

"They'd ask 'Daddy, did you break the web?'" Hachamovitch said. "Most of the time I could honestly say 'No.'"

In a broader sense though, Hachamovitch said, that others might disagree that Microsoft, had in fact broken the Web. "Web developers might answer the question differently," he said.

Hachamovitch then went on to talk about Microsoft's commitment to interoperability and steps that it has taken. Microsoft announced earlier this week that IE 8 would use its most standards compliant mode by default. The company said it believed that move would assuage developer concerns as well as regulatory and competitive issues.

However, a top Opera executive told CNET News.com yesterday that Microsoft's move addresses only one of several concerns that the browser maker had raised with the European Commission.

Aiming to demonstrate that its commitment to interoperability goes beyond fancy statements, Microsoft said Monday that it is shifting its plans for the next version of Internet Explorer to make the program more friendly to Web standards.

The software maker said that a planned standards compatibility mode will now be the default rendering engine when IE 8 makes its debut. Microsoft has already said that the new browser is capable of passing the Acid2 rendering test.

"We think that acting in accordance with principles is important, and IE 8's default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action," IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch said in a blog posting.

With IE 8, Microsoft plans to have three rendering modes: the new standards-compliant mode, the IE7 rendering engine, as well as an option for displaying older Web sites. Because of the default shift, Web sites that want IE 8 to use its IE7 engine will have to add a tag to their site's code.

Microsoft noted that there are some legal reasons for changing course. "While we do not believe there are currently any legal requirements that would dictate which rendering mode must be chosen as the default for a given browser, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue," Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said in a statement.

At the end of last year, Opera complained to the European Commission about Microsoft's browser practices, and last week Microsoft was handed a record fine for its past noncompliance with EU dictates.

Microsoft hasn't said when the final version will be out, but a beta version of the browser is due out in the first half of the year. There also will likely be more browser news later this week, when Hachamovitch gives a keynote speech at the Mix '08 conference in Las Vegas.

In one of the most significant moves yet in the growing push toward service interoperability on the Web, tech giant Yahoo announced Thursday that it is supporting the OpenID 2.0 standard for a universal Internet log-in.

No matter what your views of Yahoo's current stability may be, this is undoubtedly a big victory for OpenID. Not so long ago, the protocol was considered a dot-com/futurist pipe dream. OpenID was created by Web 2.0 guru Brad Fitzpatrick, who founded LiveJournal and was brought on board at Google last year as one of the most prominent players in its OpenSocial developer initiative.

OpenID is designed to facilitate single log-ins for multiple unaffiliated Web sites. Gradually, large sites like AOL and Plaxo have begun supporting the standard, but it remains a tool for the Web's early-adopter set rather than the online community at large.

But recently, fueled by debate over social-networking interoperability, universal standards have been one of the most buzzed-about subjects in Web 2.0.

Yahoo, which counts its registered users at 248 million worldwide, says that supporting OpenID will mean that OpenID-compatible accounts are available to a total of 368 million Web users. When Yahoo's support of OpenID goes live, starting with a public beta launch on January 30, this will mean that a Yahoo ID can be consolidated into an OpenID account that will be valid at all partner sites.

On the flip side, sites that accept OpenID will have the option of displaying a "Sign in with your Yahoo ID" button.

As more major Web players start to sign onto OpenID--and more casual Internet users start using the standard--there will inevitably be security concerns raised. Since OpenID has no central repository for identity management, users can choose which sites they trust with their OpenIDs. But that doesn't mean they're going to always make the right decisions. Sometime in the not-so-distant future, an incident or two will likely surface that will call into question just what universal standards mean for privacy and personal security on the Web.

This is an area to watch.

There's been plenty of talk about data portability over the past few weeks, what with Facebook taking issue with a Plaxo script that imported user data from one social network to the other. But the news has mostly dealt with tiffing and squabbling--until now.

A group called the DataPortability Workgroup announced Tuesday that representatives from Facebook, Google, and Plaxo have signed on as members. The group, spearheaded by Chris Saad of start-up Faraday Media, is a sort of alliance of Web thinkers devoted to "(putting) all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end data portability."

Bloggers were ecstatic. ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick said that "if these industry titans can put aside their rivalry and work together, magic could happen." And TechCrunch's Duncan Riley was giddy over the news, claiming that "this day will be remembered" and that "by joining...Facebook is embracing open standards and open access, and that is a huge fundamental change from its previous stance on being locked in to closed standards."

In other words, DataPortability hopes to bridge one social media site to another, using existing technologies like OpenID and RSS.

It's a good first step. But the road ahead isn't going to be a smooth one, and social-media enthusiasts hailing the age of "true interoperability" shouldn't hold their breath. This will take a while.

For one, some of the companies with representatives in DataPortability don't exactly have histories of agreeing with one another. Last week, the debate over data portability was ignited when popular blogger Robert Scoble (a DataPortability member) was banned from Facebook (represented in the DataPortability group by Benjamin Ling) for using the aforementioned script from Plaxo (represented by platform guru Joseph Smarr). "The goal with DataPortability is to sort of look at the Scoble incident as...a canary in the mine," Saad said in an interview with CNET News.com. "Users are going to want to do this more and more."

Social-networking interoperability has been hailed across the Web as a necessary next step in the evolving medium. The road map for Google's hyped OpenSocial initiative, which will use a common markup language to make applications and widgets compatible among participating social networks, does not yet include a plan for data sharing between different services.

Additionally, levels of official affiliation in DataPortability vary, meaning that a representative may enthusiastically agree upon a social-networking standard only to present it to a boss who balks at the idea. Facebook confirmed that it considers Ling to be its official liaison to the alliance and Smarr is Plaxo's. Google, represented in DataPortability by LiveJournal creator and OpenSocial guru Brad Fitzpatrick, was not available for comment. But Saad said many of the other members of DataPortability, who come from companies like Yahoo, Six Apart, and MySpace.com, are "more likely to be personally interested rather than company representatives."

And having a coalition of recognizable names won't necessarily mean that lofty goals will get accomplished any time soon, or at all. (Cases in point: the HD DVD alliance, or the United States Congress.)

Participants are understandably enthused. "I think it has been a grassroots movement that has grown over the last year," Plaxo's Smarr said in an interview with News.com. "I think people realize they were all kind of working toward the same vision, where users are in control and data can move seamlessly across applications."

Nevertheless, it's important to keep in mind that DataPortability, unlike Google's OpenSocial, is not an agreement to adopt a set of standards. It's a group of Web personalities, many of them rivals in one capacity or another, who show interest in developing some kind of standard. This looks like a legitimate effort on behalf of some great minds who really do want to make the social Web run more smoothly, but anything like this is going to take quite some time to overcome the roadblocks.