Bad News on IE6 XML Support

["Roger L. Costello" <costello@mitre.org>]

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/