mca blog

spent the morning in sessions on IE8 rendering and JScript engine. looking for cool details on how the rendering is done; how IE8 will handle standards; and how JS8 improves speeds and compatibility.

not quite.

the IE8 rendering talk was OK, not great. lots about the process that went into the new rendering engine. not much on key diffs, improvements, variances to deal w/ in the future. one take-away. this is a new engine that was built to support Word and other MS products in the future. in other words, the engine is quite a bit more abstract than the one built for the IE5-era. in all, that's proly good. it might mean support for XAML and other cool stuff way in the future. it might mean this abstract thing will be a beast to maintain. we'll see.

JScript perf talk was really about the new JScript profiler for IE8. meh. it's cool. like Firebug or the opera dev tools. so that's nice. nothiing enlightening about writing better JScript, tho. key take-away here? IE8 has a native JSON object (based on JSON2. that's cool. support for CSS Selectors was mentioned, but not shown.

so IE8 has a new redner, JS has a new profiler. nice, but not great.