IE8 and IE7 Standards Documentation

As of the second half of February 2010, Microsoft has started publishing documentation describing web standards support with Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 7. According to the Redmond company, the resources made available for web developers are designed to detail variations from standards when it comes down to the implementation in Internet Explorer 9’s predecessors. At the end of the past week, the Redmond company published a new batch of documentation. The complete list with the latest documentation published by Microsoft is included at the bottom of this article, courtesy of Adrian Bateman, IE program manager.

“In addition to publishing these new documents we also refreshed the previous content based on your feedback. We have received feedback (…) and I’m very grateful for the time spent to so thoroughly review the information. Today’s release completes the documentation for the relevant final-approved web standards from W3C, ECMA, and ISO and I’d like to encourage you to send me feedback to help us make further improvements. You can leave comments here or post questions or comments to the Documentation on Standards User Forum on MSDN,” Bateman stated.

Microsoft is currently working on the next iteration of Internet Explorer, namely IE9. At MIX10 in mid-March, the company released a Platform Preview of IE9, namely the core of the browser, a release aimed at getting developers test-drive their websites and applications for the successor of IE8. The promise from Microsoft is that IE9 will be a huge step forward in terms of modern web standards compatibility, with support for HTML5, CSS3 and SVG.

“While most of the interoperability information we have provided relates to final approved web standards (for example a Recommendation from the W3C), CSS 2.1 is the exception. We have discussed in the past how important we believe interoperable CSS 2.1 is to the web development community. Having a comprehensive test suite available from the W3C is one aspect of ensuring that interoperability and publishing documentation about where product behaviour varies is another. Because CSS 2.1 is still a W3C Candidate Recommendation we will update our documentation should the specification change and as the test cases in the test suite become officially approved by the working group. We will do this until the standard reaches final approved Recommendation status,” Bateman added.

Here is the list with the latest Standards Documentation for “IE7 and IE8: 

“[MS-CSS21E]: Internet Explorer Extensions to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Level 2 and DOM Level 2 Style Specifications

“[MS-DOM2CE]: Internet Explorer Extensions to the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification

“[MS-DOM2CEX]: Microsoft XML Extensions to the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification

“[MS-ES3]: Internet Explorer ECMA-262 ECMAScript Language Specification Standards Support Document

“[MS-ES3EX]: Microsoft JScript Extensions to the ECMAScript Language Specification Third Edition

“[MS-HTML401E]: Internet Explorer Extensions to HTML 4.01 and DOM Level 2 HTML Specifications

“[MS-ISO10646]: Microsoft Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS) Standards Support Document

“[MS-ISO8859]: Microsoft 8-bit Single-byte Coded Graphic Character Sets Standards Support Document

“[MS-XMLSTYL]: Microsoft XML Associating Style Sheets with XML Standards Support Document.”

 Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview is available for download here.