On the php|architect blog today Orlando Medina points out a few goodies in Internet Explorer 9 that could be useful for PHP developers out there.

Microsoft has some catching up to do in terms of standards compatibility, but they are also doing some good things with this browser. They are bringing some much needed web-standards compatibility, in addition to some JavaScript performance enhancements.

Handy new features include better HTML5 support, CSS3 support, XHTML parsing, Javascript compilation and an overall trend towards a more standards-based approach that Microsoft hasn't worried about in a good while now. He also mentions the OData toolkit that lets your web applications speak the same "language" according to Microsoft's more unified specification.

On the Microsoft Interoperability Blog today there's a new post looking at using PHP to help create web slices (little saved chunks of web pages) in Internet Explorer 8.

A web slice is content on a web page which a user can subscribe to. The content is then available from a button in the Internet Explorer 8 Favorite's toolbar. When the content is updated, the button glows orange to alert the user that there is new content. When the user clicks the button, they see a drop down window with the updated content of the web slice.

They show how to use PHP to create the content to fill a slice with some simple content. A slice isn't much more than a part of your web page with a div tag classed as "hslice". IE8 can then pick that part of the site up and save it to the user's browser. You can see en example here.

If you've ever had the frustration of working with Ajax in Internet Explorer and have noticed it caching the requests/results, you might want to check out this new post on the JSLabs blog for a helpful hint.

While working on an AJAX project over the weekend, I ran into the following issue: (through a GET request), every time I tried to call a certain function, It was returning the same data (which was supposed to be different each time)

First, he tried just changing the headers (via PHP's header function) to see if IE would understand the new message, but to no avail. He finally figured out that, despite whatever headers were sent or how much the content changed, what he really needed to do was to provide the script some kind of unique identifier with each request (just appended to the url) so that IE knew the request was different. His weapon of choice was a date/time value.

If you've ever had the frustration of working with Ajax in Internet Explorer and have noticed it caching the requests/results, you might want to check out this new post on the JSLabs blog for a helpful hint.

While working on an AJAX project over the weekend, I ran into the following issue: (through a GET request), every time I tried to call a certain function, It was returning the same data (which was supposed to be different each time)

First, he tried just changing the headers (via PHP's header function) to see if IE would understand the new message, but to no avail. He finally figured out that, despite whatever headers were sent or how much the content changed, what he really needed to do was to provide the script some kind of unique identifier with each request (just appended to the url) so that IE knew the request was different. His weapon of choice was a date/time value.