1.10. Summary

There are many improvements in IE 8 for web developers, but also some concerns about compatibility with existing web sites. The best move to make in the short term is to either test your web sites with IE 8 and determine if they render and behave properly, or immediately add the HTTP Compatibility Header to indicate that IE 8 clients should render and behave like IE 7 clients did. The decision to adhere to web standards by default will pay off in the long run for developers as they have fewer cross-browser difficulties. IE 8 also provides features to drive traffic back to web sites using Accelerators and Web Slices. IE 8 support for CSS 2.1 provides a selectors API to access elements in JavaScript rather than traversing the DOM, better support for printing, and the ability to add content to a web page using CSS. AJAX functionality has seen multiple improvements including support for the Back and Forward buttons and the ability to make cross-domain requests. IE 8 has many great new features for users as well, which will help ensure that many visitors to your web site will be using it, so be prepared!