Ozzie.eu

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/

Web Platform Docs claims itself to be a new community-driven site that aims to become a comprehensive and authoritative source for web developer documentation. This is not an unusual effort, to bring together on one place all the information needed by Web developers for creating application that use open standards web technology. But never has it been done before with stewards that are none the less than the top businesses and companies in this industry. The Web Platform Docs has put together, among others, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple.
On their site there are numerous helpful tutorials and articles about open Web technologies. To find  out more about this collaboration platform, you can watch the video below:

The greater good that this effort brings is that finally there’s a place to find unbiased documentation for web development regardless of brand, browser or platform.
Check it out!