Microsoft has posted the Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit page. While the links don’t work quite yet, odds are good that an announcement will be made at MIX. Hat tip to Jonathan Snook for the link.
There’s some interesting information available on the site, including how to make your site “light up” on IE8:
- Site-specific contextual menus called Activities
- Web Slices, which provide individual feeds of information from parts of a Web page. This seems to be akin to the capabilities added to the most recent version of Safari on OS X
- CSS 2.1 Compliance and “some of the most requested CSS3 features by web developers and designers.”
- Developer Tools for debugging JavaScript, CSS and markup
- And more
We’re on the precipice of another major phase in Web development, and given the recent arguments and outrage around IE8, which ended nicely, it is likely to be contentious at best, and outright nasty at worst.
Here’s to hoping that we as an industry have progressed a bit and embrace meaningful debate and dialog over diatribes and partisanship.