The future looks very dark here in Norway - the people of Norway managed to vote for the red-green opposition even though we have seen four years of significant growth and optimism. I am still amazed that people believe state spending and heavy taxation is the solution for economic growth and a long-term welfare state. But enough about that and over to some great news from Microsoft.
The IE7 team posted further updates on the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 7. Notable improvements include further CSS & web standards fixes as well as:
- Native XMLHTTPRequest (which I requested in an earlier post). It will work in the same way as the Mozilla/Opera/Safari implementation making Ajax/DHTML development easier as well as safer since XMLHTTPRequest will not rely on ActiveX.
- The SELECT element is rebuilt as a windowless control. This makes dynamic form development easier and more accessible. When displaying other elements over a select element the select was visible on top - this will now be fixed.
Read more at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/13/465338.aspx
The other major news from Microsoft is the preview release of Atlas. Atlas is Microsoft’s framework for building Ajax applications. I haven’t had a chance of looking at it yet - but it looks very .net focused. Visual Studio 2005 (beta 2) is required. I hope the framework offers standalone client-side components which can be implemented without .net. We use .Net but I do not like the integration between client and server scripting.
Read more at http://beta.asp.net/default.aspx?tabindex=7&tabid=47
Technorati: AJAX, Microsoft, IE7, CSS.