RE: Bad News on IE6 XML Support

[Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>]

>it or rely on it.  What you actually did ship with IE 5.0 and 5.5 was a

>non-compliant version. Hiding a compliant version deep in your web site
for 

I thought we were talking about IE6.  "Wea Culpa" on IE5x; we fixed it
in IE6.  If your Café con Leche site had said something like "I am still
angry about Microsoft screwing up IE5.x, so I am using IE6 as an excuse
to vent about it", I wouldn't be disagreeing.  But you are claiming to
speak about Microsoft's current release and motives.

>Microsoft already knows about this and made the choice for the reasons
I >described. Here's a malformed document:
><test>&#x0005;</test>

This falls into the category of not breaking stuff that already works.
The whole "blueberry" debate should have made it apparent that there are
many, many real people who produce XML that has such characters in it.
We fixed the XML parser to correctly fail on such characters, but
unfortunately the IE team does not agree with your assessment that it
would be a good thing for customers to have us break their existing
apps.  And don't even try to claim that the existence of XML documents
with such characters is Microsoft's fault.  I have seen these coming
from VMS and Unix systems just as much as anywhere else.  The IE team
chose not to penalize users for having such documents.  This is
technically a conformance violation, yes -- but I trust that they know
their users better than I do, and I think that alarmism over this
particular issue is rather extreme.  You are entitled to disagree
vehemently, but if this is the only thing you are complaining about, I
hardly think "the whole thing is completely broke."

>readers swearing that my books are wrong because I tell people to use
>text/xml instead of text/xsl. And I've got a standard from response
that 
>tells them to complain to Microsoft, not to me because I'm right and 

Well, step back then -- you acknowledge that text/xsl works on all
browsers, and text/xml+xslt works on ... none?  So regardless of how
"right" you are, you would encourage users to do something that would be
guaranteed to not work? You must envision some immense benefit from the
use of "text/xml+xslt" that would make it worth trying to get everyone
to do something that clearly does not work.  I still am wondering what
browser supports "text/xml+xslt".  So if IE for example supported that
and disabled text/xsl, would Microsoft get beat up for breaking
compatibility with Netscape?  Sure thousands of customers would be
angry, but we could say "we are right and you are wrong."  Certainly it
is important for us to support text/xml+xslt, but again I think you
*might* blowing this out of proportion.  I have never heard of a single
customer saying, "I can't do what I want because IE only supports
'text/xsl' instead of 'text/xml+xslt'".  It is also highly suspicious
that there could be any competitive advantage for Microsoft to avoid
reading the new mime type.  It's an oversight (which seems to affect
nobody and arguably helps preserve compatibility with other browsers).
Please don't read any more into it than that.

>to be. These are *not* problems in MSXML. They are problems in IE. 

Agreed.

>Agains, see the above cited thread and message from Microsoft's Aung
Aung. 
>IE most definitely does cripple MSXML3. 

OK, so I read through the thread, and I can see where you are coming
from.  I would argue that your first example (ASCII 0x05) is an example
of IE *not* crippling XML as much as the spec demands, and I do not
agree with the level of emergency you place on this particular issue.
You and I would probably both have made IE fail here, but I'm not too
comfortable saying what is best since I have also seen how often people
try to use IE to look at some XML from a Unix or VMS machine or
whatever.

On the other hand, the example of IE rejecting plane 1 characters is
pretty annoying, and I will make sure it gets priority as a bug that
should be fixed.  Anyway, thank you for your persistence.