Mix 08 – Day One
Day One is drawing to a close, the die-hard party animals are venturing out onto The Strip, and the weak and feeble old geeks like me are quietly fading into the background and sneaking off to sleep. Today’s sessions were mostly good, highlights for me being:
The presentation of IE 8
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(see previous post)
- Huge improvements to W3C compliance
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CSS 2.1 Compliant. W3C Certification-tested
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“Real world interop begins with CSS support”. (uh… yeah, we know that… ;o)
- IE team are really focused on W3C compliance (couldn’t be more right)
- IE8 by default will interpret content in the most standards-compliant manner. This is not IE7 mode J
- IE8 has an IE7 compatibility mode (controlled by page / developer)
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Performance
- Much better than IE7, still working on it.
- Still trailing Firefox, Safari from slide shown very briefly.
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HTML 5 Start
- Ajax back-button support added. End user gets the expected user experience.
- Connection events: Page can be aware when you go offline. Page can then store data locally and save later when reconnected to web
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Dev tools
- Big steps taken to improve developers’ lives with an extension like FireBug, but in some respects more feature-complete
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Activities
- Right-click context menu actions that can be specified using xml. Example was “search for this on eBay”
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WebSlices
- Possible to monitor slices / aspects of a page and be alerted when it changes. Ie: a “watch”
Ray Ozzie talking the future architecture of Microsoft’s offerings
- Key take-away for me was the move to more loosely coupled services instead of tightly coupled components
- Moving more products into The Cloud, as alternative offerings to Server products. With SQL Data Services being the next offering, as a hosted SQL product in the cloud.
- Ubiquitous digital assets – when we buy media we will be able to access that media on any of our assets, and it will live in the cloud. So if you blow away your Media centre, when you register your new one it will recover your assets.
Frank Arrigo’s panel discussion
Frank Arrigo hosted a panel discussion talking about monetizing web 2.0. His guests pretty much agreed that the two most feasible models were ad-driven revenue and the Freemium model. The panelists had some great discussions about data portability (Chris Saad from the Data Portability project was on the panel), open APIs, and the phenomenon where a successful service like Facebook (Tim Kendall from Facebook was on the panel) has to allow the people using the platform to monetize their apps before the platform itself can monetize. So they in effect provide the VC for their service consumers by providing a free platform. Interesting angle. Hopefully more to come tomorrow J