Microsoft's Internet Explorer team has announced a partnership with ESPN for the creation of a new website that will not only cover the upcoming 2014 World Cup soccer tournament but also incorporate the latest web browser programming features.
As shown on Microsoft's Exploring IE blog, the ESPN FC World Cup Essentials website has been created to offer soccer fans the latest headlines from the tournament that begins on June 12, along with match schedules of the teams involved, a history of the World Cup and much more. There's even a 3D globe that can be navigated to check out specific highlights from the long history of the tournament.
However, the site also gives users a chance to check out what's possible with a modern web browser such as Internet Explorer 11, much like what Microsoft did in May when it partnered with 22tracks on their website. The blog states:
To create this immersive sports experience, we utilized the latest HTML5 standards including CSS3 animations, transitions and 3D transforms, WebGL using Three.js to create 3D navigation, and Pointer Events for input that works great across touch, mouse and pen. The 3D models and textures for each of the player graphics are loaded asynchronously for a faster experience. In order to render text content for the team names, match scores, and days in WebGL, we rendered them to a 2D texture using the 2D Canvas API and used Three.js to push those textures into WebGL. We used Ember.js to keep the WebGL content in sync with the rest of the site.
In other words, there's a lot of programming that's been put into this World Cup website that Microsoft has helped ESPN to create. Don't worry; these features should also work on other modern browsers such as Firefox and Chrome.
What do you think of Microsoft helping to create yet another website that's meant to promote the use of Internet Explorer?
Source: Microsoft
