The Browser Report

The IEBlog has a new post on HTML and DOM Standards Compliance in IE8 Beta 1. It’s a pretty in-depth article with lots of juicy details, and is well worth a read. Lots of what they cover — that you should still read in the blog post — are covered additionally in these two whitepapers:

DOM Core Improvements

During Internet Explorer 6’s long tenure as the leading market-share holder, Web developers revealed many bugs and inconsistencies in Internet Explorer’s DOM. Today, with the Internet Explorer 8 versioning plan, these bugs and inconsistencies are corrected by default, and those customers who choose to opt out of this behavior may enable IE7 compatibility mode.

Read about and download the DOM Improvements whitepaper.

HTML Improvements and ACID2

HTML uses elements to represent both structure and meaning in a document. To help developers take full advantage of the elements that HTML 4 offers, and to better provide the semantic meaning intended by Web author, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers has upgraded support of the P and OBJECT presentational elements. Through improved support of these HTML elements, Web developers may build more expressive and accessible HTML markup.

Read about and download the HTML Improvements and ACID2 whitepaper.

IE8 Beta 1 For Developers Now Available in Chinese (Simplified) and German

“The IE team is pleased to announce the availability of Chinese (Simplified) and German versions of Windows Internet Explorer Beta 1 for Developers. The two languages released today are fully localized versions of the IE8 English Beta 1, released March 5, 2008. They carry with them the same improved CSS 2.1 support, better scripting performance, and other features and improvements that the English beta 1 developer release contains.”

(Via IEBlog.)