My Talk at London Web Standards

Tomorrow I will be at the State of the browser event held by London Web standards where I will be giving a talk about IE9. If you don’t know me, I work for Microsoft in the UK, as an Evangelist,  where I talk about web development. Over the past 6 months I have focused heavily on HTML5 and related technologies, which I am slowly falling head over heels in love with.

As someone who visits events up and down the country representing Internet Explorer, I know better than most people that, amongst web developers, some older versions of IE are about as popular as a tooth extraction. So tomorrow I’ll be talking about how Microsoft is trying to fix their mistakes and learn their lessons from history.

One of my fellow Canadian peers told me recently, if you’d have bought a cat when IE6 was released, it would be dead today. I think he was trying to say, in his own rather sadistic way, ten years is a long time. No one ever imagined that IE6 would still be around in 2011. If anything, this shows us how important standards are. A bad browser has ramifications for far longer than traditional software.

IE9’s focus and commitment to standards bodies has never been so strong.  With broad support for HTML5, CSS3, EcmaScript5 and more, the Internet Explorer team has submitted almost 6,000 tests to the W3C as part of a comprehensive test suite to help make sure developers can write the same mark-up and use it across browsers.

I’ve only been at Microsoft for a year and in that year I’ve seen the fruits of the changes to the way we operate as a company and I think the IE team are a shining example of how we are developing products with greater agility, community involvement and transparency. The good news is this community involvement is having a direct effect on the quality of products we are releasing.

Now we know we are not finished, and we know there is work to be done. Tomorrow will be a great opportunity for you to tell me what we should be doing in the future, and what you care about as web developers.

Oh, and maybe we can have a beer or four as I don’t need to drive.

BTW, I asked Rob Hawkes, Mozilla’s Newly minted technical Evangelist to come along to talk to you about Canvas at 15:10. If you haven’t seen Robs talk yet you really should it’s awesome.