Internet Explorer 9.0: A Standard Compliant Browser

BANGALORE, INDIA: W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has to its credit the onus of bringing discipline to Internet by means of defining standards.  W3C, as we all know is an international governing body which works along with public and member organizations (over 300) to develop web/internet standards.

Few standards that have gained global attention in the recent years are HTML 5.0, CSS 3.0 and SVG 1.1 (2nd Edition). In today’s consumer driven online market, one element that remains a top priority and a challenge for a developer is providing analogous experience to end users across leading browsers.

In the past, we were not surprised if an Internet Property got rendered in variety, across browsers. We were also used to the fact of standardizing display for the most popular browsers ahead of the least popular ones. With time, and keeping in mind the interest of the vast consumers online, one has to cater to minority user base as well. Here is where a browser can make a difference in providing standard compliant implementation along the lines of what W3C community defines.

Internet Explorer 9.0 (IE9) spearheads the league on the standards adoption, by way of submitting over 2000 tests for HTML 5, SVG, CSS3 and DOM to W3C working groups. This is a definitive evidence of early adoption of W3C defined standards. Another way of measuring IE9’s compliance to standards is via the Acid3 tests (the same is published as part of IE9 Platform Preview 4 - http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/).

Acid3 test is nothing but a web standard project believed by majority as a measure of web browser platform’s compliance to standards.  Acid3 test of IE9 Platform Preview being published publicly, scores a whopping 95/100. The remaining 5 areas as indicated by the tests are something that are evolving and would follow suite as and when they show signs of making it to the mainstream.

The philosophy behind supporting industry standards is evident with IE9’s implementation for HTML 5 tag. While W3C has not defined, favored or mandated any particular video format, IE9 in its endeavor to comply with standard supports H.264 codec industry standard.  H.264 is an industry accepted standard being defined by Video Coding Experts group (VCEG) and Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG). H.264 is preferred due to its capability in delivering high quality video content at low bit rates with high video compression. Check out the below HTML 5 line of code that plays a video content without leveraging any plug-in based player. 

In the above code, Wildlife.MP4 is a H.264 encoded video file. The implementation takes care of providing a seamless and light weight rendering of video on the HTML 5 compliant browser. More examples can be quoted for CSS3 & SVG as well, but fact remains that the industry is heading towards standardization of evolving web standards.

IE9 continues its journey towards standard based implementation and a definite boon to developers in the context of a web browser. ‘Interoperability’ continues to be a top priority for developers in delivering a uniform experience across browsers & IE9 compliments this phenomena.

(The author works for Developer & Platform Evangelism group @ Microsoft Corporation as an Enterprise Architect Advisor)