Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Today at MIX, Microsoft announced the first developer preview version of IE9, a far from finished, but usable look at where IE is headed. Microsoft will update this preview very couple of months or so.

There’s a great deal new, and much for us in the web design and development community to be encouraged by, and you can learn more in a series of posts at the IEBlog.

While HTML5 and CSS3 are currently getting a lot of attention, IE9 will support SVG, making it the last of the major browser to do so. While wonderful shims like Raphaël from Australia’s own Dmitry Baranovskiy (which provides a JavaScript interface for SVG and Microsoft’s SVG-like VML), and Google’s SVGWeb which transparently adds support for SVG in IE versions 8 and older using Flash (developers only need to add a link to the library and their SVG works in IE via the magic of Flash), having full native support of a standard vector format is a big step in the development of the web.

At @media in London in June, Doug Schepers, the W3C’s go to guy for SVG is presenting the timely “SVG Today and Tomorrow” – a get up to speed quick session for designers and developers on SVG. Just another reason to get to the event, which we believe features our best lineup yet, and indeed one the best lineups of experts covering relevant up to the minute topics you’ll ever see.

And for those looking for a quick primer on SVG, there’s a chapter dedicated to it (and HTML5 Canvas) in my Developing with Web Standards