ThinkingNectar

This is a long overdue post to cover what I think is to be a interesting meetup.

September meetup saw the PHP user group at Yahoo Singapore office.  Same location as the Flex User Group meetup that was held just the day before.

Beyond the formalities by Michael, we have Alex who did a short reharsh of what he said at the Flex User Group and a bit more, the most interesting item we have on the agenda was Chris from Microsoft Singapore to talk about IE8. Talking about IE8 at Yahoo. How nice. Also Micheal did mention that the reason why Chris is giving this talk is that he wants to see Yahoo Singapore office.

Chris did a good presentation, in terms of content and style of what IE8> have to offer. Webslices and Accelerators.

Webslice in short allows the webmaster to mark out a portion of the page whereby users can subscribe to and consume such portion from the comfort of their browsers without visiting the site itself. And Webslice sites at the top of the browsers, below the address bar from the demo. Note sure if this is configurable.

The advantage of Webslice form what I see is “Page Embedded RSS”. It is another markup to outline what can be consume and in which form.

For Accelerators, it is a contextual information gathering tool. Accelerators can be build be content providers and from what I observed, works off RESTful API. Behaviour wise, the user can select a string of character of interest, right click and select the accelerator of choice to work on the string of character.

For example if you are reading a simple review on a local movie site, you can select the title of the movie, pick the YouTube accelerator to work on the title of the movie and you can (potentially) get the trailer of the movie to watch.

I am impressed by this and it brings up a notch in user experience.

Of course anything that deals with IE have a lot of reaction from the crowd. Mainly is that IE8 rendering is more standard based. This means webmaster have to relook their pages to make sure that what was “made wrong” for IE7 have to be reworked to “make right” for IE8.

In addition, a question posed was when IE6 will be out of the market. Nobody knows, but everyone wants to know.

I liked webslices as webmaster can marked out part of the pages to be consumed by users. It will help the less tech savvy to use (IE8 Horror!) IE8 beyond the usual page to page browsing.

Of Webslice, I have concerns about how analytics will perform when it comes to this. How does the webmaster differential between a full page access and a webslice access? Seems from documentation that this is not really possible but content provider have an option to provide a alternative update source for any webslice and IE8 will query that source instead of a full page load. Well designed.

For Accelerator, it seems to be rather useful but I am concern about Accerlerator creation where any one can create an Accelerator service off any RESTful API. Imagine a rather popular but small startup have a RESTful API that was used to create an Accelerator that was widely used. And this Accerlerator was created not be the startup itself. This luckless site will have no way to block Accelerator access unless it close down it API.

And off course, Chris was brave and sporting enough to show some features that was similar to Chrome with was just launched a few days eariler. Like individual thread for each tab, contextual address bar that searches title on top of URLs to name a couple.

Overall, a very enjoyable evening with the presence of many other developer like Uzyn, Lester and gang. Note to mention myself, Marc and Adrian. Great Meetup!

BTW, I heard about Webslice and Accelerators way before the meetup as the nice people from Microsoft did pay me a visit at my office eariler that month.