Microsoft announced the launch of Inter­net Explor­er 8 yes­ter­day; I urge every­one to down­load it as soon as pos­si­ble, and to encour­age their friends to do like­wise — espe­cial­ly if their friends are using IE6. It’s great that we have anoth­er stan­dards-com­pli­ant brows­er on the mar­ket, and I hope that adop­tion is swift.

What I would real­ly like to see from Microsoft now is a series of iter­a­tive releas­es intro­duc­ing new stan­dards; rather than wait­ing three years for IE9, I would much rather wait one year for IE8.1. Gen­er­al man­ag­er, Dean Hachamovitch, has stat­ed that there is a com­mit­ment on their side as long as test suites exist, so I call on all brows­er mak­ers and stan­dards bod­ies to work togeth­er to achieve that.

The recent release of the Safari 4 Beta saw a new stan­dards pro­pos­al from the Webkit team, for con­trol­ling ani­ma­tion using CSS. While there’s still a debate to be had about whether CSS is the right lan­guage for this (I still fall on the side that it does­n’t, strict­ly), I do think their imple­men­ta­tion is well han­dled. I want­ed to try it out, so I went back to the ear­li­est form of dig­i­tal enter­tain­ment: Pong!

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