Ajax Girl

Microsoft made some interesting statements at their Microsoft Technical Summit event (MTS07) this week. Pete LePage, a Product Manager on the IE team, gathered a small swatch of the academic, business, and open-source community constituents in a room, chatted about the future of IE, and asked for feedback. Some interested bits:

• It turns out Microsoft actually made the right call on WHATWG and <canvas>. Over the past few years, many of us have been asking Chris Wilson and others on the IE team to implement some of the WHATWG stuff like canvas, SVG support, and so forth. Chris in particular would always answer that they were uncomfortable with the IP issues surrounding the WHATWG, such as the patent policy. I had assumed that was simply a way to avoid the issue, but surprise surprise, with Apple asserting a patent on canvas, they come out looking pretty smart on this topic — and it paints a sad picture of the state of the industry. I have no idea about the encumbrance status of any of the other outputs of WHATWG, including the upcoming off-line stuff.
• The IE team is right now in the process of locking down features for IE.next, so if you have feedback, get it to them now. They read Ajaxian and will read comments on this story in particular if you’d like to suggest something. You can email them directly to start a dialog, if you’d like. (Pete dot LePage at Microsoft is one channel). I asked for much improved dev tools, so that we can for example get some detailed introspection on memory management behavior inside IE.
• Michael Koziarski, a Rails committer, asked for detailed technical specs on the behavior of IE. Pete said that if there are any aspects of the behavior of IE that we want documented, email him, and he’ll make sure we get the docs we need.

See other places on the blogosphere for detailed coverage of the conversation with Mike.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/microsoft-canvas-and-the-whatwg