Microsoft has unveiled its Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, which includes expanded support for HTML5, hardware-accelerated graphics and text, and a new JavaScript engine. Together these let developers use the same markup and deliver graphically and functionally rich Web applications that take advantage of PC hardware via the operating system.
Microsoft also announced that it will contribute to the jQuery JavaScript Library and announced the release of SDKs for the Open Data Protocol (OData). OData is an HTTP and Atom-based approach to data portability for a number of languages and platforms including .NET, Java, PHP, Objective-C (iPhone and Mac) and JavaScript. Developers can access the OData SDK to download the 'Dallas' CTP2. The second Community Technology Preview (CTP) code-named "Dallas" is an information marketplace powered by the Windows Azure platform, which provides developers with access to third-party datasets that can be consumed by Web and mobile applications. By making content and data available with an OData feed via Dallas, developers can access and monetize their data under their terms and pricing, which can be can built into applications to deliver unique user experiences.
The company's support for HTML5 includes CSS3, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), XHTML parsing, and the video and audio tags using industry-standard (H.264/MPEG4 and MP3/AAC) codecs, among others. In addition, Microsoft has demonstrated a new JavaScript engine that uses the multiple cores of multicore CPUs. According to Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, the company provide better interoperability between ASP.NET and the jQuery JavaScript Library by enhancing ASP.NET so .NET developers can better incorporate jQuery capabilities. In addition, Microsoft will actively promote and distribute versions of the jQuery JavaScript Library by packaging it with popular products such as Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2. As a first step, Microsoft will contribute a templating engine to the jQuery JavaScript Library Team to simplify Web applications.
