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Today Microsoft announced a new set of tools to help you support modern and older versions of Internet Explorer.

The site makes available a scanning tool that, provided a URL, detects common coding practices that may cause compatibility problems or prevent your users from getting the best possible experience on a webpage rendered on IE. For instance, I ran the scanner on this blog and the report was as follows:

A common problem from supporting old versions of IE was detected. The scanner found that the blog webpage was currently rendering in a Compatibility Mode on Internet Explorer 9 and 10, due to the following tag:

<meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible"
      content="ie=emulateie7">

Other “nice to have” issues were detected like a lack of responsive design and no Windows 8 features like a touch browsing interface or a live tile for the start screen.

After removing the compatibility tag, the common problems were all fixed.

Another interesting part of this site is that virtual machines are made available for both Mac and Linux developers to download and be able to test their Web applications on Internet Explorer, using various versions of the windows operating system and the browser:

Finally I leave you with the insights from two IT professionals about how challenging it is to develop web application given the number of browser and client devices that exist:

Modern IE Homepage: http://www.modern.ie/

The Web is evolving in a way that it’s more accessible than ever before, through a growing number in kind of personal devices. One might navigate the Web from a PC or a touch enabled device. The challenge for web developers is to adapt the User Interface to each client device capabilities and support the features on an effective manner.
This is where to Bootstrap framework comes in. It was made to not only look and behave great in the latest desktop browsers, but in tablet and smartphone browsers as well.

Built at Twitter by @mdo and @fat, Bootstrap utilizes LESS CSS, is compiled via Node, and is managed through GitHub.
Along the same line, but with site creation using the new Windows 8 style, you might want to check out Metro UI CSS.
Metro UI CSS allows to create a Web site in the style of Windows 8 quickly and without distractions on routine tasks.
The great value added by this frameworks is that you get a great looking, responsive and adaptive UI that you can put on your own Web applications.
Twitter Bootstrap: site
Metro UI CSS: site

A few months ago I posted about the feee e-book Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
The companion content for has been updated. So download the companion content again if you’ve already got it:
http://go.microsoft.com/FWLink/?Linkid=270057 (59.9 MB)
Here are the details of the update from the author:
This update fixes one bug in the HereMyAm examples for Chapters 8, 9, 13, and 17 in the file pages/home/home.js. The one line within the updateImage function:
    app.sessionState.fileToken = list.addOrReplace(app.sessionState.fileToken, newFile);
is replaced with
    list.addOrReplace(app.sessionState.fileToken, newFile);
This corrects a bug where transient session state was preserved across the suspend-terminate-restart boundary only every other time because the app.sessionState.fileToken was erroneously overwritten with “undefined”.

Source: Microsoft Press