Ie 5 Improves Standards But Wsp Still Wants Better Css

Computergram International, Nov 5, 1998

Microsoft Corp has made the first public beta of its Internet Explorer 5.0 web browser available for technical evaluation, but web developers are still unhappy about the company's lack of support for World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards. Microsoft has said the final version of the browser will support extensible markup language (XML), extensible stylesheet language (XSL), HTML, the document object model (DOM) and cascading stylesheets (CSS).

The Web Standards Project remained unimpressed. So much so that on Monday the WSP launched its "IE Top 100 CSS Problems", an analysis of shortcomings in the way CSS was implemented in the developer beta of IE 5. "We realize the next version of Internet Explorer is still in beta and hope that these problems will be fixed by the final release so that Explorer will be 100% compliant with CSS-1," said WSP project leader George Olsen, "especially since Microsoft has been spending development time adding non-standard extensions to CSS in their beta releases so far." Non-standard extensions are becoming a more and more politically charged issue for the Redmond software company. The WSP was established in a bid to pressure both major browser vendors to implement W3C standards in a more systematic way. It scored a significant victory last week (CI No 3,526), when the Mozilla Project published a new roadmap committing itself to NGLayout, a next-generation layout engine that should improve support for CSS and DOM. Microsoft rival Netscape Communications Corp promised to follow suit when it bundled Mozilla code for release as Navigator 5. Microsoft can't afford to lose any ground. Standards, though, are only part of the story. Microsoft promises a range of new features in IE 5, collectively referred to by the brand name: "IntelliSe nse". A new search assistant will perform metasearches, polling a number of search engines simultaneously and aggregating results. The autocomplete feature, which guesses URLs and keywords based on the first few characters entered, has been extended. The browser also corrects common typing mistakes in URLs. IE 5 sports another new feature called "Web Accessories", which display extra content in separate browser window panes. For example, Bloomberg Financial Markets has signed with Microsoft to provide its customers with stock quotes and financial news in the separate pane. What makes the feature attractive to partners like Bloomberg, Alexa Internet and the New York Times on the Web is its persistence. The main window may be displaying some other site but the user is still exposed to the Web Accessories content - and, of course, to any ads. The new browser seems particularly aimed at corporations, where Microsoft already enjoys a short lead over rival Netscape Navigator in organizations enforcing browser policies (CI No 3,452). Microsoft promotes IE 5's ability to find its own mobile proxy settings as one example of the way it could lower administration overhead and reduce total cost of ownership. Corporations are encouraged to begin evaluating the beta and to make use of IE Administration Kit 5, also released in beta on Wednesday. IE 5 is available for Windows 3.1, 9.x and NT and Sun Solaris, with HP-UX and Macintosh releases also planned.