IE Mobile in WP 7 Sports JavaScript and CSS Enhancements

Redmond-based software giant Microsoft has a lot of enhancements in store for its upcoming Windows Phone 7 operating system, and some of them are expected to affect the experience offered to users by the Internet Explorer Mobile included in the platform. Among them, the company notes a series of JavaScript and CSS enhancements, which originally included support for the -webkit-text-size-adjust CSS selector, as well as for -ms-text-size-adjust, but which lost the -webkit prefix in the process.

Originally designed with support for both the -ms- and -webkit- prefixes, the development team decided quite fast that only the former will remain in the mix. It seems that the plan to include support for -webkit-text-size-adjust in IE Mobile browser for Windows Phone 7 created quite a buzz when announced only two days ago, and on Tuesday the team decided to drop this plan.

“Our original intent in adding support for this WebKit-specific property was to make Web developers’ lives a bit easier by not having to add yet another vendor-prefixed CSS property to their pages to control how text was scaled. Even more specifically, we intuited that the most common use case for this property was to explicitly set it to “none” in order to tell the browser not to scale a particular section of text,” a recent post on the IE for Windows Phone Team blog reads.

The property would have allowed for one to prevent the browser from scaling the text when a page displayed a picture with associated caption, causing the text to remain on a single line. However, based on community feedback, coupled with the implications of implementing other browser vendors’ CSS properties, the development team decided to leave this plan aside, and to have only the -ms- prefixed version implemented.

In case there are some interested in the new scripting functions in IE Mobile for Windows Phone 7, here's what the development team lists:
- getElementsByClassName(name): given the class specified by name, returns all of the elements or sub-elements within the scope of this function call
- querySelector(selector): given the selector, returns the first element within the sub-tree of the scope of this function call that matches the selector
- querySelectorAll(selector): given the selector, returns all elements within the sub-tree of the scope of this function call that match the selector.