At the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference 2005 in Los Angeles, Chris Wilson announced some great new web developer platform features:

“we’ve continued to fix CSS and other web standards bugs, but we’ve also rebuilt the <select> element as a windowless control, so it can be visually layered under other elements. IE 7 implements a native XMLHTTPRequest object for Javascript applications, instead of requiring an ActiveXObject to be created. This also means XMLHTTPRequest will function on machines that have ActiveX disabled. We’ve providing support for International Domain Names we’ve also done some thoughtful work to prevent spoofing of URLs by using similar characters from other languages.”

No more <select> element madness! Oh, happy day! Happy, happy day!