July 31, 2000

Printer ready

Internet Explorer:
Microsoft's IE 5.5 Fails The Test

The many proprietary extensions to industry standards that Microsoft has implemented in the new version of its Internet Explorer browser may very well frustrate and alienate the Internet and E-commerce developers that the company most wants to attract

By Jason Levitt

Related links from our sister publications:

InternetWeek Operating Systems (6/19/00) InternetWeek Microsoft Confirms IE Bug But Has No Timetable For Fix (5/22/00)

Send Us Your Feedback

icrosoft's recent release of Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows is aimed squarely at the Web-development community, but the many proprietary extensions to industry standards in the browser could alienate the group Microsoft most wants to attract.

In January, Microsoft delivered Internet Explorer 5.0 for Macintosh with a complete implementation of the World Wide Web Consortium's Cascading Style Sheets Level 1 (CSS1) specification. Everybody applauded. Microsoft took great effort to implement 100% of an important public Web standard in the browser.

Surely, Microsoft could have done the same in its Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows, released earlier this month. The fact that Microsoft didn't--about 80% of CSS1 is implemented in IE 5.5 for Windows--and instead continued adding proprietary developer technologies, has created a sore spot in the developer community.

Indeed, Microsoft claims that IE 5.5's developer features are the result of a 17-month effort by a team of more than 250 Microsoft staffers. This seems hard to believe, given the relatively brief list of new features.

Despite the lofty claim, IE 5.5 poses no standards competition to the Netscape 6 preview release that I reviewed in April ("Netscape's Challenge,"), nor does it give IT support departments any compelling reason to upgrade their existing IE 5.0x user desktops.

IE 5.5 offers mostly nonstandard and proprietary extensions to existing W3C standards. This move will cause Web developers more grief by spreading Web technologies that run only on the Windows platform and Internet Explorer browser.

Microsoft says these developer features are the result of customer demand, but those of us covering the browser beat for the past five years see it as a tactic to hold on to market share at the expense of developer sanity.

Netscape was guilty of similar moves during the Navigator 2, 3, and 4 releases. The inevitable result of such tactics is more legacy browser baggage for developers and increased support costs for businesses.

That said, IE 5.5 for Windows does deliver some improved standards support and new scripting objects that offer interesting development possibilities. Among them is support for editable regions in an HTML page that lets a user edit parts of a Web page. This is useful for editing various kinds of data before sending them back from the server.

There's also an implementation of HTML+TIME that lets developers synchronize multimedia effects with Web elements in a Web page. The other development enhancements fall under the broad category of Dynamic HTML (DHTML). CSS1 is one of the core World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards in this category. As mentioned earlier, Microsoft has increased its implementation of CSS1 to about 80% of the spec. At the moment, this brings IE 5.5 for Windows closer to IE 5.0 for Macintosh's level of support.

Unfortunately, IE 5.5 for Windows fails the Acid Box Model Test, a test of CSS1 compliance that Microsoft called "the brass ring for standards support among browser software vendors" when it released IE for Macintosh 5.0 in January. IE 5.5 does no better than IE 5.0 on this test. Microsoft says IE 5.5 fails the test because of legacy issues with the IE 4 for Windows implementation of CSS1 that Microsoft hasn't corrected in IE 5.

While Microsoft has incompletely implemented CSS1 and Document Object Model Level 1, another core DHTML standard, the company is pursuing a number of proprietary extensions to these standards that, while useful for developers, move the developer focus away from agreed-on standards.

The main new developer feature in IE 5.5 that fits this category is something Microsoft calls element behaviors, which give developers a clean way to embed scripts into their Web pages, thus providing separation between scripts and content.

The lack of separation between script and content has made maintenance of Web pages quite difficult, especially with technologies such as Microsoft's Active Server Pages, in which large amounts of HTML content and script are often intermingled. While Microsoft has submitted element behaviors as a draft specification to the W3C, the specification is still considered a work in progress that could be dropped or changed at any time by the standards body.

This tactic of deploying technology in the Web browser and then submitting it as a draft standard to the W3C so browser marketing literature can declare it to be on a W3C standards track isn't in the best interests of developers, despite Microsoft's contention to the contrary.

Besides element behaviors, most other developer features in IE 5.5 are useful, but not dramatically so. A new scripting object called popup lets developers create menus, dialogues, and message boxes that appear outside the browser window but aren't separate instances of the browser. Judicious use of the popup object can make Web applications appear more like standalone Windows applications.

Part of the improved CSS1 implementation is the ability to render vertical text--important for authoring in Chinese and Japanese, which are laid out from top to bottom, instead of left to right as in Western languages.

HTML+TIME is another Microsoft concoction that the company has submitted to the W3C as a draft specification. It lets developers synchronize multimedia effects with Web elements in a Web page. HTML+TIME is essentially a set of HTML tags, attributes, and an object model for synchronizing events and providing timing in a Web page. Using HTML+TIME, it's possible to develop a richer multimedia experience for users.

Along with HTML+TIME, IE 5.5 gives developers a number of new graphics filters to work as part of improved CSS1 support. One of the new filters--the Matrix--lets developers scale and rotate objects easily.

In-place editing is a new attribute that can be added to Web documents via HTML or scripts to allow WYSIWYG editing of text fields. It lets scripts in Web pages make parts of the Web page editable on the fly and simplifies entry and manipulation of data.

IE 5.5 includes no noticeable changes to the interface, so users running IE 5.0 shouldn't notice a difference. In fact, the only new feature users will notice is a Print Preview menu selection that works the same way it does in Microsoft Word: It gives a WYSIWYG preview of what the printed page will look like before it's printed. Print Preview is already a feature of IE 5.0 for Macintosh.

IE 5.5 has a number of bug fixes and security patches, but most business sites should have little reason to upgrade if they're already running IE 5.01 Service Pack 1, which contains all the same security patches and many of the same bug fixes. Sites running IE 5.0 or 5.01 without the current security patches should update their browsers with IE 5.01 Service Pack 1 to plug all the known holes.

According to Microsoft, IE 5.5 has undergone significant stress testing and is more stable than any previous version, so sites that have specific stability issues with their IE browsers will want to test IE 5.5 to see if it suffers from similar problems. Microsoft says it has increased performance on sites that make heavy use of frames. Previous versions of Internet Explorer spawned a new instance of the IE rendering engine for each frame of a frame set. IE 5.5 manages all frames in a frame set from a single instance of IE, a faster and less resource-intensive method. In testing the browser, however, it was difficult to notice any significant difference.

For sites that create their own customized versions of IE, there's also a new Internet Explorer Administration Kit 5.5 to create customized versions of IE 5.5 for company administrators and Internet service providers. This kit only creates IE 5.5 for Windows browsers. Sites that want to create custom Internet Explorer for Unix will need to use Administration Kit 5.0.

Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows is positioned to become the world's dominant browser. It's unfortunate that Microsoft has chosen not to make it more compatible with IE 5.0 for Macintosh and decided instead to pursue proprietary extensions. Unlike Netscape 6, which uses the same platform-independent rendering engine, ensuring identical rendering across platforms, Microsoft continues its steady release of browser versions with no unification in sight.

Excluding legacy browsers, there are five shipping browsers from Microsoft: IE for Windows 5.5; IE for Macintosh 5.0; IE for Unix (Solaris and HP-UX) 5.0; the Pocket Internet Explorer in Windows CE 3.0, which has an IE 4-compatible engine; and the dual-mode (Wireless Markup Language and HTML) microbrowser that's part of Microsoft's Mobile Explorer suite.

Microsoft will likely try to push its unique implementation of industry standards until the market pushes back. And I predict that developers will be pretty vociferous in their rejection of this proprietary technology.

Back to This Week's Issue
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page

---