RE: Bad News on IE6 XML Support

[Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>]

> http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform
> namespace. This is about two years too late, but 

As opposed to Netscape, which still does not ship with XSLT support, and
even the Mozilla tool (last time I checked) which does allow XSLT to be
used does *not* support any form of CSS?  At least IE has been capable
of using the correct namespace with fully-supported products and
standards compliance for quite awhile.  What other product can claim
that?  This article is totally missing the point that the support for
the recommendation namespace *has* been available well before IE6
shipped.

> At first glance, CSS support for XML does not seem to 
> be significantly improved. For instance, display: 
> table is still not supported.

I will admit that CSS support is incomplete across the whole industry.
Of course, this is not exactly an XML issue.

> The XML parser built-in to IE is thoroughly broken. It 

There is no XML Parser "built-in"; IE6 uses MSXML 3.0, which ought to be
a paragon of standards-conformance (including rejecting illegal XML
characters).  If you have specific bug reports with the conformance of
MSXML, please let us know.  We have seen a few conformance bugs that I
believe have been fixed (even in IE6, the conformance bug fixes have
been integrated into MSXML3 as well as being added to MSXML4, so IE6
ships with fixes for some conformance bugs that Antenna House reported,
and so on).  Honestly, any objective data that we are seeing in
Microsoft makes us think that we have done a pretty good job of setting
a good example for conformance.  I am someone feels it is "thoroughly
broken", but that doesn't give us much to go on.

So I suppose that when people get their hands on Windows XP we will see
flame-throwing like this saying "Windows Media Player *still* does not
implement XML 1.0 correctly."

> 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.

As http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xsl-editors/1999JulSep/0016.html
shows, this was in the spec not long before it was released.  People
needed *some* way to associate a transform with an XML document, and
this was the best we could do at that time.  In fact, it is the best
that anyone has ever done, as far as I can tell.  Again, last I checked
the only other browser that even supported this (the unsupported plugin
for Mozilla), was quite happy to accept text/xsl as well.  I have
forwarded this to the IE people who handle Mime-mapping, and I agree
that application/xml+xslt should be supported, but let's be honest about
the magnitude of this bug.

> Bottom line: any doubt that the IE team at Microsoft 
> actually cares about standards has been erased. More 

This message has been forwarded to the people responsible so they are
aware of this perception.

> 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

Again, this is misleading.  MSXML *does* implement these standards, and
I thought in a pretty good way.  This isn't even a part of IE, so it's a
bit unfair to slam IE.

> parser/XSLT processor, the IE programmers deliberately 
> chose to cripple it rather than support standard XML!

IE6 uses MSXML3.  IE6 does not "cripple" it in any way that I am aware
of.  I believe that IE6 defaults to be compatible with older documents
(which MSXML3 now rejects if they use high ASCII characters and so on).
Again, if you are saying that IE kills documents that load fine in MSXML
without IE, then please give some specific examples, as that would be a
bug.

< snipped long tirade with uninformed speculation about Microsoft
motives />