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Partnering with Adobe on new contributions to our web platform

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In recent releases, we’ve talked often about our goal to bring the team and technologies behind our web platform closer to the community of developers and other vendors who are also working to move the Web forward. This has been a driving motivation behind our emphasis on providing better developer tools, resources for cross-browser testing, and more ways than ever to interact with the "Project Spartan" team.

In the same spirit of openness, we’ve been making changes internally to allow other major Web entities to contribute to the growth of our platform, as well as to allow our team to give back to the Web. In the coming months we’ll be sharing some of these stories, beginning with today’s look at how Adobe’s Web Platform Team has helped us make key improvements for a more expressive Web experience in Windows 10.

Adobe is a major contributor to open source browser engines such as WebKit, Blink, and Gecko. In the past, it was challenging for them (or anyone external to Microsoft) to make contributions to the Internet Explorer code base. As a result, as Adobe improved the Web platform in other browsers, but couldn't bring the same improvements to Microsoft's platform. This changed a few months ago when Microsoft made it possible for the Adobe Web Platform Team to contribute to Project Spartan. The team contributes in the areas of layout, typography, graphic design and motion, with significant commits to the Web platform. Adobe engineers Rik Cabanier, Max Vujovic, Sylvain Galineau, and Ethan Malasky have provided contributions in partnership with engineers on the IE team.

Adobe contributions in the Windows 10 March Technical Preview

The Adobe Web Platform Team hit a significant milestone with their first contribution landing in the March update of the Windows 10 Technical Preview! The feature is support for CSS gradient midpoints (aka color hints) and is described in the upcoming CSS images spec. With this feature, a Web developer can specify an optional location between the color stops of a CSS gradient. The color will always be exactly between the color of the 2 stops at that point. Other colors along the gradient line are calculated using an exponential interpolation function as described by the CSS spec.

Syntax:

linear-gradient(90deg, black 0%, 75%, yellow 100%)

radial-gradient(circle, black 0%, 75%, yellow 100%)

CSS Gradients in the Windows 10 Technical Preview

You can check this out yourself on this CSS Gradient Midpoints demo page. Just install the March update to Windows 10 Technical Preview and remember to enable Experimental Web Platform Features in about:flags to enable the new rendering engine. This change will bring IE to the same level as WebKit Nightly, Firefox beta and Chrome.

Another change that Adobe has recently committed is full support for <feBlend> blend modes. The W3C Filter Effects spec extended <feBlend> to support all blend modes per the CSS compositing and blending specification. Our new engine will now support these new values like the other major browsers.

New blend modes expand existing values normal, multiply, screen, overlay, darken and lighten with color-dodge, color-burn, hard-light, soft-light, difference, exclusion, hue, saturation, color and luminosity.

To use the new modes just specify the desired mode in the <feBlend> element. For example:

<feBlend mode='luminosity' in2='SourceGraphic' />

Internet Explorer 11

feBlend in Internet Explorer 11

Project Spartan

feBlend in Project Spartan on the Windows 10 Technical Preview

You can try this out today at Adobe's CodePen demo in Internet Explorer on the Windows 10 Technical Preview by selecting "Enable Experimental Web Platform Features" under about:flags.

We are just getting started

Congratulations to the Adobe Web Platform Team on their first commit! We are looking forward to a more expressive Web and moving the Web platform forward! Let us know what you think via @IEDevChat or in the comments below.

— Bogdan Brinza, Program Manager, Project Spartan

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2015
    This is great news, but I hope it is only the vanguard of a switch to a completely open source model for Spartan. I don't see what practical or commercial purpose is served by retaining a closed-source model.

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2015
    And yet it still fails to properly address the gamma correction when scaling the images (as in this test: www.4p8.com/.../gamma_dalai_lama.html)

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2015
    OMG, yas. Keep it coming Microsoft!!!

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2015
    great work ... BUT sigh .. all closed and secretive ... It really is sad that you haven't adopted transparency in your development process... You're the modern browser should be open in every sense of the word!

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2015
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  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2015
    Felicitari Bogdan.

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2015
    Isn't Edge mode in IE11 designed to be the same as Spartan? Can we expect the IE11 Edge mode to be the same as Spartan when they ship, or did I misunderstand the plan where IE11 Edge would evolve over time with Spartan, and IE10- would be left to age gracefully?

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2015
    This is great!

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2015
    When do we get to contribute fixes? I'd like to fix textarea cursor placement. I'd like to add textarea stretching. I'd like to add improvements to the dev tools UI to bring it up to modern UI specs. I'd like to fix the focus/selection issues with the url in the address bar. I'd like to fix the bug with popup/named windows sharing the same name space context across domains. I'd like to fix the bug with partial addresses being deleted if the user switches focus to another app to get the info they need to finish typing the URL. I'd like to add developer/advanced flags for users to disable the most annoying issues in IE that make developers despise developing in IE... e.g. the inability to launch the developer tools from the new tab page or to run javascript: URLs from the new tab page. ... and dozens more

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2015
    And i'd like fix the behaviour of http-basic-auth in iframes to make it consistent with chrome/firefox... It's the one single thing i do UA detection for.

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    March 23, 2015
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  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2015
    Very cool. Interesting to see Adobe and Microsoft collaborating in such an important way.  Seeing the blendmodes from SVG's <feBlend> extended to a full range of Photoshop-like blend modes is very exciting. Hopefully, someone can come tell us all about this at The Graphical Web in September!

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2015
    @Jon - you have to ask yourself: "If Microsoft won't fix the most minor of UI glitches that cause years of user and developer frustration - What confidence do you have that they will catch up to other browsers and actually implement all the new features properly?" Microsoft and the IE Team have had multiple failed attempts at transparency, at open bug tracking, at making a blog comment form work, at making decent dev tools, at implementing the most simple-name-describes-the-exact-implementation APIs without failing coughdocument.getElementById(id);cough with not 1, not 2, but 3 separate bugs in the initial implementation. I'm sorry but the "we're going to play the standards (and semi-open) game now" talk is just a little bit cheap and is 10-15 years too late.

  • Anonymous
    March 24, 2015
    Could you make the autosuggestion tool stop suggesting read news articles whilst not suggesting news frontpages. If I go to www.arbitratynewssite.com and then click trough the newsarticles www.arbitratynewssite.com/articles/?0001 www.arbitratynewssite.com/articles/?0002  etc etc then autosuggest wil keep suggesting recently visited URI's to the (read) articles and not suggest the homepage which is actually the page I want to visit first.

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    March 24, 2015
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    March 24, 2015
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  • Anonymous
    March 25, 2015
    NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooo-...

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    March 25, 2015
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    March 26, 2015
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    March 31, 2015
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    April 15, 2015
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