Internet Explorer 8 and Its Impact on Your ASP.NET Web Sites

This Wrox Blox demonstrates how standards compliance in Internet Explorer 8 will impact your Web sites. It will teach you how to immediately ensure visitors to your sites have a positive experience using IE 8, while also giving you time to test your site or make any necessary changes. The IE 8 browser will undoubtedly cause many current web sites to render or behave incorrectly, since so many web sites were either developed prior to modern web standards, or without consideration for standards. In addition, many Web developers used non-standard techniques in order to get their sites to work properly in older versions of browsers.

There are several new features in IE 8 designed to drive traffic to your Web site. Accelerators provide the ability to highlight content on a web page and perform an action on it. How often have you selected an address on a web page, copied it, and then pasted it into the proper fields of a mapping Web site? In IE 8 you can select the address and use a mapping accelerator to quickly display that address on a map. By creating your own accelerators, you can provide this feature to save users time and bring them to your site. Web slices are similar to RSS feeds, but let you subscribe to content directly within a web page. Your users can easily determine that new content exists, and it is easy for content creators to setup.

IE 8 compliance with CSS provides several improvements with support for pseudo classes, counters, and the selectors API. The pseudo classes ":before" and ":after" can be used to add content to web pages from within a stylesheet. CSS counters are perfect for content that needs to be numbered, without requiring the numbers to be embedded in the content. The selectors API utilizes CSS selectors in JavaScript to locate elements rather than traversing the DOM tree.

AJAX has been growing in popularity and is used on many web sites, but it also introduces some problems. Changes made on the client are not recognized, so the browser back and forward buttons don't work as expected. IE 8 provides a mechanism to use AJAX without losing the typical navigation experience. AJAX developers often want to utilize content from 3rd party web sites, but current browser implementations block this due to security concerns. IE 8 includes a new object and technique to enable these cross domain calls.

IE 8 will certainly impact web developers with its strict support for existing standards, which will cause many existing sites to render and behave incorrectly. It also provides many new features that can be used to simplify creation of web sites and increase productivity.