Alcides Fonseca

First of all, it ¹ was an excellent keynote! Not that b.o.r.i.n.g keynote I’ve seen in TechEd Barcelona (Somasegar simply doesn’t have that charisma it needs to make an hell of a presentation!). And I deeply liked this keynote. Not that always-the-same keynote Mr Jobs does all the time²! They really called people to show interesting stuff made in their technologies.

From Ozzie’s talk, you get one thing: Microsoft is definitely moving from a software products to software services. I see them in 8–9 years to let go Office (the desktop app) and provide Office Online only. It has not been talking, but it’s a great solution against the piracy their been experimenting.

They did the right thing for standards, that’s true. However I will never forget that they did it one version later. IE7 would be the perfect version to make the move.

Improved scripting performance. That just the natural evolution, no big deal. It’s around the same values as the last firefox and webkit.

They also fulfilled one item of my ie8 wishlist, the HTML5 partial rendering. That’s the only nice thing I’ve seen.

Built-in developer tools. Everyone LOVES firebug. That’s just a copycat.

WebSlices. Have you heard of Safari’s WebClip? No special markup needed! They wanted to get in the microformats world, but I don’ think it was the best way.

Activities. This is the one point they wanted to integrate the social web in the browser. Although WebServices/Activities have a nice and easy spec, that’s again the wrong approach in my opinion. Search is already handled by OpenSearch and all the interactive context should be handled by microformats. Which I haven’t heard of in the entire keynote (and hSlice doesn’t count!).

Microsoft talks all the time about innovation, but the truth is I haven’t seen any in IE8. Has anyone noticed that the interface is exactly the same as IE7? Even the searchbox is the same! I really hope that changes until the Gold.

Just bare with some quick notes about SilverLight2. They’re focusing it in video, that’s what I learn from the news. They also showed some RIA examples, but does anyone see any real advantage comparing to Flex? Apart from being .NET? Me neither. The only thing I really wanted from Silverlight is years away: 3D. Is even any Silverlight Papervision3d clone around?

Oh wait, there was one lovely thing I predicted: Silverlight went mobile and also for Nokia’s. That’s the only way I’m gonna be using Silverlight for now.

¹ Silverlight apps have the same problem as Flash. You cannot easily have a direct URI for each page. Microsoft should have made it better for Mix Sessions!

² Before you zealot guys start to call me a Microsoft clone, I proudly own a macbook, and I wouldn't trade it for any other laptop running XP or Vista!

Well, tomorrow in MIX08 keynote, Dean is going to talk about IE8 and even show it (rumors say at this time there is already a private beta program running).

The IE8 team (and some other guys at MS) noticed that the webdesigners and developers didn’t particularly like the IE8 behavior towards standards, and with MIX coming up, they definitely want to please designers, so yesterday they changed their minds and IE8 will follow the standards rendering the pages for default. This is a huge news! When everybody says that Apple listen to their users (regarding 10.5.2), Microsoft does the same about their ever-hated browser.

There is also one thing I guess their going to announce tomorrow: the fact IE8 will ship with the silverlight plugin. Everyone is expecting this, but it’s their way of convincing more designers to enter the silverlight wave. And Apple will also announce the same for Safari in next mac event…

After yesterday’s announcement, I’m already please with Microsoft, but there are a few things that would make me even more happier. First it would be the Microformats UI. After Mozilla dropping microformat UI support for Firefox3, this would be an excellent news to higher IE in people’s consideration.

Another news I would love to see is the OpenID support. Right now, I get the feeling Microsoft is becoming a security freak. They already have Cardspace support, but for regular internet surfers, they will only use it, if attached to an OpenID. So we could expect a Cardspace+OpenID support, but I guess not now.

The final feature, and this one would be the one I would really fall in love with MS, but I know it’s impossible, is the HTML5 (even if partial) rendering support. There are already a few folks wearing html5, so it would help people to move forward, and even pressure the standardization process.

Or just yet another post about the future of webstandards after th dark IE8 news. I understand their point that they will broke the web if they follow standards, but following standards is the right thing to do. Luckily this seems a temporary issue for proper websites because HTML5 will work correctly without any stupid little tag.

So what about this post’s fancy title? Well, I found this post that is working almost as a chain post or meme from developers who support the Web Standards and have set their personal deadline for 1st January 2010 to stop caring about non-standard stuff in webpages they author. From now on, I am one of them.

Oh, and I can’t wait for HTML5 to come out!