[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Bad News on IE6 XML Support
Cafe con Leche XML News and Resources [1] reports bad news on IE 6 XML support: > I've now successfully installed Internet Explorer 6 on > my NT box and have been able to check out its support > for XML (or lack thereof). I've also received a number > of reports from readers. > > First the good news: IE6 does seem to support XSLT > 1.0. I haven't run it through extensive testing but it > did correctly render all the simple XML + XSLT 1.0 > examples I took from the XML Bible 2nd edition. It > does recognize the > http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform > namespace. This is about two years too late, but > better late than never. > > Now for the bad news (and there's a lot of it): > > At first glance, CSS support for XML does not seem to > be significantly improved. For instance, display: > table is still not supported. > > Microsoft still labors under the illusion that there > is a MIME media type text/xsl. IE does not recognize > the actual MIME types text/xml and > application/xml+xslt as identifying XSL stylesheets. > > The XML parser built-in to IE is thoroughly broken. It > accepts some malformed documents as well-formed. It > rejects many real-world well-formed and even valid XML > documents as malformed, most embarrassingly the first > edition of the XML 1.0 specification itself. > > Bottom line: any doubt that the IE team at Microsoft > actually cares about standards has been erased. More > than three years since XML 1.0 was released and almost > two years after XSLT 1.0 was released, IE still does > not correctly implement these specifications. Even > though the XML parser group at Microsoft provided the > IE group with a relatively standards conformant XML > parser/XSLT processor, the IE programmers deliberately > chose to cripple it rather than support standard XML! > > The excuses that the IE team simply made a mistake in > interpreting the spec, or that their software shipped > before the specs were finished are no longer tenable. > The only reasonable interpretation of Microsoft's > actions is that the IE developers believe it's more > important to maintain compatibility with broken, beta, > Microsoft proprietary experiments than to support > proven, reliable, standard specifications. They do > not exist in a culture that rewards compliance with > specifications. At most they care about > compatibility with other Microsoft software. They are > simply not willing to expend any effort to improve > compatibility with the rest of the world. In the > future, one must assume that Microsoft will > implement only those parts of XML specification that > they like, and that they will change, modify, extend, > and break those parts of the specs they don't like. > Conformance to standards is simply not a > virtue in the Microsoft world. [1] http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/
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