Sorry this update is a little late, to make up for it I added a day to the week. There are some very interesting stories from Microsoft this week. The biggest story is the adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard. While this isn’t directly web related, it’s been a pretty controversial topic and could have some wide reaching implications. With OOXML being adopted by both ISO and ECMA, it provides an open standard for MS Office Docs. Not surprisingly, IBM and a few others have some problems with the format, but this could be sign that Microsoft will work to publish more of their standards. I know that I would be happy to see some open standards related to RIA development.
The IE8 team released a document on MSDN that lists the CSS capabilities of the various versions of IE. This includes the IE8 Beta and the planned implementations in the final release of IE8. Looking through the document, it appears that all of the CSS2 pseudo-classes will be supported as well as the CSS2 specs for generated content, which have both been a bit buggy
Finally, Microsoft announced that it would be including a “desktop-grade” web browser in the next version of Windows Mobile. The browser will support Flash and Silverlight and is yet another sign that web designers and developers have to start considering mobile devices when building web applications.
As with last week, here are a few new tutorials that might pique your interest. Betrand Le Roy has written a good tutorial on improving accessibility of the UpdatePanel and Mike Snow has written a series of tutorials on developing games for SilverLight.
That’s it for this week; I’m off to play my Xbox 360 Vintage.
Ian Muir
