How to make your site Internet Explorer 8 Compatible – Part 1 – Activities

Now that we have installed the new Internet Explorer 8 beta 1, developers need to make their site IE8 compatible.

There are several designer aspects to be taken care of in this new version. Let us take the points one by one to discuss this further.

First we will look into Activities.

Activities

Activities are contextual menu options which quickly access a service from any Web page. Users typically copy and paste from one Web page to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do.

Activities are services that the user can install and manage. Users can install them from the Internet Explorer 8 Service Guide or through any website that advertises Activities.

Activities typically involve two types of scenarios: “look up” of information within a Web page, and “send” of Web content to a Web application. e.g. look up – You are in a blog where the users address is mentioned. Right click and View on Live maps and it will show a small window containing the map of the loacation. send – An user reads an interesting article and wants to digg it or add to his blog.

Activities are described using an XML file providing an interface to the browser to communicate with the service through URL templates.

More discussion on this and an example can be found at the Microsoft Website mentioned below.

Detailed Information & Example