At the Mix"07 conference in Las Vegas—Microsoft"s annual event for web designers and developers—the spotlight has largely been on Microsoft"s Silverlight platform, formerly known as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere. Silverlight is a set of tools for developing rich, Flash-like web applications. Less talk has focused around the web browser that will provide the primary user interface for all this new technology. On the Internet Explorer blog, Chris Wilson hinted at some of the things that might be coming in IE 8, while declining to give specific details.
While details may be lacking, the structure of the conferences planned for Mix"07 gives a few hints. Improvements in RSS, CSS, and AJAX support are all being given high priority. It is also widely speculated that IE 8 will include support for microformats, small tags embedded in HTML code that can be interpreted in various ways by software, such as calendar events or contact information. Microformat support is scheduled for Firefox 3, so IE 8 will have to include them in order to keep up. The new version may also include more options for user interface customization, as that was one of the biggest criticisms of IE 7, and one which the developers often blamed on lack of time.