By Rachel Chalmers
As employees and friends of Netscape Communications Corp geared up for the first anniversary of the birth of the Mozilla Organization and the associated warehouse party, customers are startled to find that the company’s marketing claims about its latest browser product, Communicator 4.51 are, well, true.
Smart browsing has been updated; users can now type keywords such as Ford Ranger or search queries like San Francisco restaurants into the location bar, eliminating the need to remember complicated URLs. Users can also type quote and a ticker symbol, such as NSCP, to retrieve the current stock price of a publicly listed company. Keyword support is also available in German, French and Japanese.
Another new feature called What’s Related links to sites similar to the one being displayed. A NetWatch feature uses the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) to provide parents, teachers and employers with the ability to filter content and screen inappropriate material. Finally, Communicator 4.51 includes the first major upgrade to Netscape AOL Instant Messenger, version 2.0. The software now provides many-to-many messaging capability through chat rooms, as well as much-needed privacy controls.
Meanwhile Microsoft Corp is making noises about the support for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Extensible Markup Language (XML) in Internet Explorer 5. As a co-founder of the W3C XML working group and a leading provider of XML technologies in the industry, Microsoft views XML as the language of choice for building data driven-applications, said VP of Microsoft’s developer division Tod Nielsen, in a statement sure to make anti- Microsoft, pro-standards developers nervous. Remarks like these have traditionally prefaced wholesale efforts on Microsoft’s part to embrace and extend publicly documented standards, so that they only work on Windows.
This time, Microsoft says, will be different. The company maintains that IE 5 is the only shipping browser to offer complete support for XML 1.0, not to mention the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), the Document Object Model (DOM) and the Namespaces Recommendation. By making these technologies an integral part of the Windows operating system, developers and end users can count on widely available, consistent and complete support for XML, Microsoft insists.
All of this will come as news to the Web Standards Project (WSP), an independent group of web content developers who lobby browser manufacturers for better adherence to industry standards. When IE 5 was originally released, the WSP panned its XML support. Internet Explorer has bugs in its basic interpretation of XML data even though there have been freeware parsers available since 1997 that do this correctly, wrote spokesperson George Olsen.
Even more surprising, Explorer’s handling of XML namespaces – which lets developers use more than one XML-based language in the same web page – violates both the spirit and the letter of that specification, which Microsoft itself helped develop. For example, Internet Explorer has hard-wired support for the ‘html’ prefix, even though developers should be able to override this.
As for that vaunted XSL support, the WSP finds it more of a curse than a blessing. What developers wanted, Olsen pointed out, was cascading style sheets (CSS), not the as-yet untried XSL. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer is heavily biased in favor of the still-experimental XSL, he wrote. This is totally unacceptable given that CSS has been a stable standard since 1996, and XSL is still very far from being finished. Also, the Microsoft XSL examples include proprietary keywords and syntax that do not appear in any of the W3C drafts being used to develop the actual XSL standard. By implementing an experimental version of XSL before supporting the finished DOM and CSS standards completely, Microsoft runs the risk that Internet Explorer will be incompatible with the actual XSL standard when it is finalized. That would not be in anyone’s best interests – Microsoft’s, the content developers’ or those of web users.
The Web Standards Project has come under fire lately for seeming to be too hard on Microsoft – a perception the group argues is just that, a perception, and not reality. WSP opponents have pointed out that standards support in Microsoft products, while far from perfect, is often better than that of the competition. The WSP tacitly concedes the point, but adds: If we have harped on Microsoft recently, it is because they have released a new product recently – and because they often come maddeningly close, and then take a detour. รก
