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Recent Changes to IE Content on MSDN

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Do you read about Internet Explorer and related technologies on MSDN? We’ve recently reorganized the table of contents for the HTML/DHTML Overviews. We would like your feedback.

Hi! My name is Lance Leonard; I'm a Programmer/Writer on the Internet Explorer Developer Content team. I'm part of the team that’s responsible for the content on MSDN that relates to Internet Explorer, specifically HTML and CSS and Internet Explorer Development.

You may have noticed that we've added a lot of new content describing Internet Explorer 8 and how it impacts the way you develop your Web sites. I wanted to let you know that we're also working to improve the content we've previously published.

Case in point, we've recently reorganized the HTML/DHTML Overviews. Previously, we had nearly 100 articles collected in one location. It was hard to locate specific articles and even harder to understand how separate articles were related.

To clarify this, we've separated the overviews into sections that are similar to the lifecycle of a Web site.

  • The Creating Web Sites section contains articles related the basics of Web page construction.
  • Content Design and Presentation deals with issues involving layout, positioning, and CSS.
  • The Data Storage and Cookies section includes persistence and other data management concepts.
  • Integrating Sites and Services provides information related to Accelerators, AJAX, Open Search and others related topics.
  • Quick Reference Guides collects summary articles designed to help you find specific facts quickly.
  • Security Considerations outline the concepts and ideas to help protect Web sites from malicious behavior.
  • The Testing Web Sites section covers the Internet Explorer Developer Tools, the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit for deploying Internet Explorer, the Mark of the Web, and other information useful for troubleshooting rendering issues and markup problems.

In turn, each section contains relevant subsections. For example, Creating Web Sites contains subcategories related to DHTML Tutorials, Scripting Internet Explorer, Tables and Forms, and so on.

The basic idea is to group related articles together, so you can find the information you're looking for more quickly... even if you don't know precisely what you're looking for.

I'd like to know your thoughts about the new organization. Give it a spin, kick the tires, and let me know what you think.

Lance Leonard
Programmer/Writer
Internet Explorer Developer Content

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2009
    PingBack from http://asp-net-hosting.simplynetdev.com/recent-changes-to-ie-content-on-msdn/

  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2009
    Well at least it has been updated. Although I will probably only ever use it to find out why IE is behaving differently to every other browser on the market. Is it really necessary to waste so much space at the top for the search bar, languages etc, signing in etc. Changing language does very little as all the developer information is in English anyway. It seems microsoft just wants to constantly get me to sign in, search the web using their search etc. If I want hotmail I will go to that page. Why not just have a nice clear website for developers.  

  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2009
    Nice article. Learned about two things I didn't know IE could do (saveSnapshot, The Internet Explorer cache is case-sensitive). You might consider providing the low-bandwidth version in a link. I find it's faster and less visually distracting. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537623(loband).aspx @Mike The low bandwidth version is less annoying in that respect. I will warn you that once you visit a URL with (loband), all the other MSDN urls you visit will be in lo-band mode. You can opt back out with the "Switch off low bandwidth view" link in the top right corner.

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2009
    Hi A major problem that I seemed to be overlooked in terms of windows and the performance are antivirus software. Antivirus software can slow down the PC and web experince very much. There is huge difference between antivirus programs and their impact on performance on Windows. See, for example in the free AVG antivirus and Eset antivirus 4. The free AVG antivirus, and others extremely slow down PC and Web browsing on older PC and are Netbook. While Eset antivirus 4 has almost no influence in practical use.   Microsoft has plans whith a free antivirus called Morro a continuation of OneCare. Therefore Microsoft should do a lot more work in marketing and telling people how much influence the antivirus on performance on PCs and webbrowsing. I really hope that Morro from microsoft become just as fast as Eset antivirus 4, whith small footprint as posible.

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2009
    A major problem that seemed to be overlooked in terms of windows and the performance, are antivirus software. Antivirus software can slow down the PC and web experince. There is a huge difference between antivirus programs and their impact on performance on Windows and webbrowsing. See, for example the free AVG antivirus and Eset antivirus 4. The free AVG antivirus, and others antivirus slow down PC and Web browsing on older PC and are Netbook extremely. While Eset antivirus 4 has almost no influence in perfomance in practical use.   Microsoft has plans whith a free antivirus called Morro a continuation of OneCare. Therefore Microsoft should do a lot more work in marketing and telling pc users how much influence the antivirus has on performance on PCs and webbrowsing. I really hope that Morro from Microsoft become just as fast as Eset antivirus 4, whith just as small footprint.

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2009
    Gerard makes many, many good points.  As the "central" source for info for developers looking to see what IE supports it should be VERY accurate, standards compliant, and be VERY forthcoming with IE's lack of standards compliance in the past.  Do not make developers hunt for the details about where and how and under what conditions IE breaks the rules or does not support things.

  • Anonymous
    April 25, 2009
    It will save web developers a lot of headache if IE8 can fix the bugs IE7 has in rendering websites. Developers are forced to make a fix in their CSS files specifically for IE7. Microsoft needs to follow the standard format that other popular Gecko-based browsers use.

  • Anonymous
    April 25, 2009
    I am not a developer. I am a browser and e-mail user. IE-8 takes much longer to load; I don't need that.

  • Anonymous
    April 25, 2009
    @Quality Directory - The version of Trident used in IE8 standards mode appears to be more CSS 2.1 compliant than Gecko 1.9.

  • Anonymous
    April 25, 2009
    MSDN has always been bloated and slow IMO. I only visit it to trouble-shoot WIE's esoteric problems or find alternatives to its lack of support for major parts of the W3C DOM. In particular, that tree menu is ugly, has scrollbars, and it's really slow to respond on my computer. When I search MSDN, I never use that thing; instead, I perform a new Google search for everything I want from MSDN. Looking at the page in low-bandwidth mode, MSDN is clean, but the design and readability is awful... You could do better than that after taking an entry-level design class. As for your table of contents, it still looks incoherent. It would probably be better to start from scratch and organize that; all I see is a huge expanse of text and nothing sticks out. You also need to free up some more screen space; the header and menu areas take up a third of the screen real-estate, if not more (I have my font sizes forced to 18px in Firefox for readability) for stuff that's either useless or could be reorganized so that it takes up less space.

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2009
    The more HTML and CSS compliant IE becomes, the better. I'm interested to see the browser grow and get back the lost followers.

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2009
    You might have updated the menu, but the content is from some dark and distant past... "Handling form submissions requires knowledge of a programming language such as Perl, C++, or server-side scripting and Active Server Pages (ASP)." LOL Why not delete all of the docs that you have and start again?  Preferably without the awful MSDN shell.

  • Anonymous
    April 28, 2009
    Not exactly on topic, but: are the IE app compat images going to be updated? They apparently expire on the 30th of April.

  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2009
    Well lets just say its al little improvement, Gr Lenen

  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2009
    @Oliver: The latest VPC images are always located here: //go.microsoft.com/fwlink?LinkID=70868 The content team assures me that the new images are currently publishing.

  • Anonymous
    May 01, 2009
    And what about developer documentation? On http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa753741(VS.85).aspx Note  This interface is available as of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and is subject to change. And we have KB articles like this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/189634 WebApp.exe Enables User to Move WebBrowser Ctrl Move a WebBrowser Control? Nowhere near what the article is for. And why the IE team broke their own compiler? Or Visual C++ wizards are broken because they use the web browser control to begin with? Is there any other web browser control feature need to op-out to maintain a behavior consistent with IE7?