Company officials said the labs site was created out of a need for developers to experiment and use new types of code before something is ready to market and people were just asking for it.
"We are receiving a lot of questions from people wondering when will HTML5 be ready," said Jean Paoli, general manager of Microsoft’s strategy team.
"Our response is that HTML5 is ready to be used today using Internet Explorer 9. So you can use whatever is stable from HTML5 in IE9. And for anything experimental, you can play and try things using the prototype."
Paoli said that because this is just a prototype, it shouldn’t be used on production sites because these standards aren’t finished yet so any site that is made has a good chance of being broken once there’s an update.
"Sometimes it takes six months, one year, one year and a half, two years in order to have what's called a stable standard," Paoli said.
"So today browser vendors have to make a choice of appearing to support emerging standards and providing developers with a production-ready platform to support the stable standards."
Paoli also said it’s important to have this prototype out there because it helps people who are in the standards body — who are trying to design the best standard for this particular technology — to actually play and experiment with software that actually implements this piece of paper they're trying to design.
HTML5 Labs goes live today with these two standards in progress, with others to follow throughout next year