RE: Bad News on IE6 XML Support

[Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>]

Joshua,

> ...
> > 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.

See, this is *exactly* my problem with Microsoft's behaviour. A conformance
bug is reported in a newsgroup; in this case on Microsoft's news server:

<http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&safe=off&selm=PNrJsjsGBHA.181%40cppss
bbsa01.microsoft.com>

The problem is even *acknowleged* as a bug.

Then nothing happens -- next time it's discussed, Microsoft says "please
give specific examples, as that would be a bug". How many times does it need
to be reported until something happens?

A similar thing is happening with the WebDAV support in MS Exchange /
Sharepoint (I mention this here because WebDAV uses XML as marshalling
format). A bug has been reported multiple times and through different
channels, yet when the problem is dicussed again:

<http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&safe=off&selm=Oke51leMBHA.1676%40tkms
ftngp05>

all the feedback we get is "oh, if this is the case this would be a bug",
and then... nothing.

To be fair, other companies have even bigger problems. The WebDAV support in
Oracle IFS is utterly broken (to the level that it can't be used at all even
with a tolerant WebDAV client like Microsoft's webfolders):

<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/2001AprJun/0253.html>

However, Oracle doesn't seem to care.

Using words like "XML" and "WebDAV" for marketing hype seems to be popular,
actually *implementing* them seems not.