RE: What about IE5

["Didier PH Martin" <martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Horacio,

<YourComment>
    Hi, Im looking for diferent opinions about IE5 and how it behaves
with XML; is it just like the beta version or better?
</YourComment>

<Reply>
Refreshing to see an inquiring mind (someone not playing the favorite sport
of these days, Microsoft bashing :-).
IE 5.x seems to be more stable. We got some bugs with the Beta that are
resolved in the final version. ON the XSL side, nothing changed. I guess
that they still consider XSL as an experiment (the spec is not officially
out). About XML: I didn't noticed anything that doesn't respect the W3C XML
1.0 spec. If the document includes a DTD it is validated, if not, it is not.
CSS support is a lot better than in the previous version. We got several CSS
scripts that where not working with the last version that now work with this
one.

As usual I would say that it is probably not 100% compliant but near of. If
it where a product from somebody else than Microsoft, people not involved in
the Jihad would say that it is "worst is best" kind of implementation. Not
perfect but can handle a lot of errors (and on the web expect everything to
happen :-). The HTML active document editor interface got several bugs in
the beta, this is now resolved. For instance, a document loaded in edit mode
would not be displayed completely. Also, the DOM is still the HTML dom, but
now you can do a Query interface to get the official W3C interface. You can
also get XML document DOM.

On the con side, I would say that it is very hard to add new style sheet
engines to the XML viewer which is an active document. So, HTML is rendered
with a HTML active document and XML with an other one. CSS2 support is not
complete. The XML rendition engine is not optimized. I made some benchmark
and noticed that it takes about the same time to render a XML with XSL style
sheet as the same document with a dsssl style sheet but the latter being an
engine launched in separate process. The MXXSL is a dll and not a process
so, it should be faster than a external process, but it is not, so either
the XML parser is slow or the XSL engine. I guess it is the latter.
In conclusion, I would say that on the XML front, you'll see more
significant changes in version 6 when the XSL specs will be official and the
CSS2 specs feedback completed.

The overall performance is improved. It seems that parts of the new Form+
engine is already in place. Also, the final release has a lot less memory
leaks than the beta version (but there is still some. I am amazed to see
that since the beginning, this software has memory leaks).

Now explorer bars are working correctly. In the previous IE 4.x version, you
got a bug where all registered Explorer bar would create a huge
view->explorer bar menu. In the beta version, IE 5.x was confounding a
communication band with an explorer bar - this is now fixed.

So I would say, put the beta in the garbage - it has bugs (obviously but is
also a resource hungry soft) and get the release. But on the XML front, no
big news. I guess that 5.x release will be where both Mozilla and IE will
come closer in terms of functionality.
</Reply>

regards
Didier PH Martin
mailto:martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.netfolder.com


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