The (ACID2 Compliant) IE8 Engine and Office 2007

After discovering that IE8 passes ACID2, I looked around the web a bit more. I linked to a video on MSDN's Channel 9, but there's another post on the IE blog that details a bit more information on the IE8 milestone, and it looks to include an entire code checkin report. This is probably the code that gets built into the MSHTML DLL file that forms the core of the IE rendering engine (much like the WebKit engine on Mac, I'm sure that many apps can use that DLL to render HTML.)

So there's a lot of changed files to make ACID2 work, and I was looking through them - some .js files, and a lot of .cpp files, but take a look towards the bottom - there are two large sets of checkins - one for something called "ls" and one for something called "pts":

//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LSTFSET.CPP

//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/ls/src/LSTXTBR1.CPP

(snip)

//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inc/FSCBKGEN.H

//depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/mshtml/src/PTLS/5.0/pts/inc/FSCBKTXT.H

(snip to end)

So what are LS and PTS? A little looking around reveals a blog post from awhile back about another couple projects in Office 2007. If I'm guessing right, ls is LineServices and pts is Page/Table Services. It sounds like some of the technologies used to create Office 2007 are also improving IE8's rendering engine.

Microsoft's Office is their cash cow. They almost give away Windows (and therefore IE) to the manufacturers, but Office is a de facto standard in the business world. I'm glad to see that development on Office is apparently feeding back into IE8. That's good news for both of Microsoft's major products, and web developers everywhere.