Before deploying a Windows Store app, it’s a good practice to run the Windows App Certification Kit. Something like this was missing for web applications. You may think that this is not necessary, because in practice the browser adapts more to the web page than the page to the browser. However, if you want to blur the distinction between a client application and a web application, you need to allow the browser to integrate it into the system. And this needs to be followed by a few basic points.
Your corporate website certainly bears the hallmarks of a unified visual style. At least a company logo. Then definitely also the favicon. As the name implies, it is an icon that appears when a user favorites a page. Or they create a shortcut to the site on the desktop. Or it is also displayed together with the URL. But it doesn't end there. For example, the logo should also contain an RSS feed. The website should be able to pin to the taskbar or the start screen. But the tiles on it are already quite large and the 16 × 16 px icon for a favicon will probably not be enough, right? Is there any easy way to keep an eye on all this?
Microsoft has created a modern tool for this. IE, which tests your website and alerts you to any issues that may make it difficult for some users to use the web application. It checks for known pieces of code that are causing problems, verifies that the browser’s latest rendering mode is being used, monitors the compatibility of JavaScript libraries with IE, warns you if you forget a vendor when using vendor-prefixes in CSS, points out the presence of Flash Player even if you are not in the Compatibility View list, which causes Flash not to appear on Windows 8. It also determines whether the page is displayed correctly on various resolution scales that today’s devices have, from Windows Phone to Microsoft Surface and Xbox 360 to Windows PC. The tool is also able to detect outdated browser detection, which is more harmful than useful (very careful with these practices). Last but not least, it will recommend that you use MSPointers API if necessary and check for msapplication-TileColor and msapplication-TileImage meta tags.
In short, it is a tool that will test a website very quickly. It will allow you to avoid the most notorious code transgressions, which the current web is unfortunately full of.
The article was written for the Czech MSDN Blog.