The resources are also available on MSDN

May 27, 2010 10:01 GMT  ·  By

In the second half of February 2010, Microsoft made an important step in proving that its commitment to interoperability also spanned to Internet Explorer. Remember, this was before the company shipped the first Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, at which point the software giant delivered the first tangible results of its work to build an interoperable web, with a focus on ensuring same markup across all browsers. But in February, Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer general manager, announced that Microsoft was sharing IE interoperability information and promised that the documentation offered would be kept up-to-date moving on.

The “Internet Explorer Standards Documentation” download was re-published earlier this week on the Microsoft Download Center, and although the Redmond company did not announce any changes, this is a good opportunity to provide an update on the resources available. Microsoft is offering the entire collection of Internet Explorer Standards documents for download packaged as a .ZIP archive via this link. Of course, developers can also browse the entire list of resources on the Download Center if they’re interested only in specific aspects of web standards integration in terms of IE. At the same time, the documentation was published online on MSDN and can be accessed free of charge.

“This documentation describes how Internet Explorer implements certain final approved web standards and how the standards in this system interact. It does not restate variations, extensions and other details that are specific for each standard. This documentation details the variations and extensions from HTML 4.01, CSS 1.0, CSS 2.1, and other final approved web standards published by W3C (as ‘W3C Recommendations’), ECMA (as ‘Standards’), or ISO (as ‘International Standards’) as implemented by Internet Explorer. This documentation is intended for use in conjunction with the Microsoft standards support documents, publicly available standard specifications, network programming art, and Microsoft Windows distributed systems concepts,” Microsoft revealed.

At the start of May 2010, the second Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9 became available for download. With IE9 Preview 2, Microsoft stressed the importance of all browser vendors working together to ensure that users and developers would be able to take advantage of the benefits inherently associated with the concept of same markup, having the same HTML, CSS and script run the same on all browsers.

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview 2 Build 1.9.7766.6000 is available for download here.