Legend Scrolls

Web Browsers And Packages

Release: 2008-05-11
Jump to Web Standards Articles TOC

Microsoft Internet Explorer (Trident)

Microsoft's Internet Explorer (MSIE or IE) is a long standing web browser with their operating system. Only the Windows edition has survived as other platforms have a whole plethora of far superior browsers of which some are also available for Windows. IE 7 is a Core Level web browser with its Trident rendering engine featuring MSHTML and MSXML as its layout engines and JScript and VBscript as its scripting engines. Trident is also being used by AOL for Windows, BT Yahoo, one of the rendering engines in Netscape 8 for Windows, WebbIE (IE6) and several other Windows-only web browsers and proprietary intranet applications. Trident V (5) in IE version 7 includes support for:

  • HyperText Markup Language (HTML) 4.01;
  • HTML 5 'Subset';
  • Web Forms 2.0's autocomplete attribute;
  • eXtensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 with Namespaces & partial XML-Stylesheet Processing Instruction (PI) (does not support PI's alternate attribute);
  • (Partial)(Simple) Ruby Annotation 1.0 for extra text annotating;
  • eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) 1 & eXtensible Path Language (XPath) 1 allows the ability to convert document structure into other document structures;
  • RSS and Atom news feed support;
  • XML Document Type Definition and XML Schema 1 for document structure validation and Entity processing (DTD only; (XML Schema design limitation));
  • Cascade StyleSheets (CSS) level 1, some Visual & Interactive and Paged level 2.1 (without CSS Tables support) and some CSS 3 selectors provides a realistic way of adding presentation and layout to your document structures;
  • Document Object Model (DOM) partial level 1 (HTML) and partial DOM 2 (bits and pieces of HTML, StyleSheets, CSS, CSS2, MouseEvents, HTMLEvents), Microsoft's proprietary Event and StyleSheet Object Models,, JScript 5.6 (similar to JavaScript 1.4) and VBScript 5.6 adds high user interaction;
  • For image support we have GIF89a, JPEG, PNG (IE < version 7: without native Alpha Transparency), Icons (.ico, .png, ...), BMP (Windows Bitmap) and XBM (X Bitmap);
  • ActiveX allows many plugins, scripts and other applications to integrate into the web browser.

provides a fair platform for experiencing the World Wide Web.

Internet Explorer supports the all, screen and print CSS Media Types and can handle webpages constructed in HTML-Compatible XHTML 1.0.
Web Designers and Web Developers are screaming for Microsoft to improve standards in their web browser so they can offer a more up-to-date online experience that users of other web browsers already have.

 IE 7 is for Windows XP SP2+, Windows Server 2003 SP1+ and is in Windows Vista. This version has a simpler user interface and improved security features such as phishing filters. Other features include tabbed-browsing, RSS Feed discovery and displaying in the browser. Improved webpage rendering corrects a lot of bugs and adds support for most of CSS2.1 and support for Alpha Transparent Portable Network Graphics (PNGs).

Internet Explorer 8 is in heavy development, currently at beta 1 so there are a few bugs to srot out such as the loss of list-style-image CSS support. It has an emulate IE7 mode to display webpages as if it was IE7 and in a webpage an X-UA-Compatible switch (meta element or http header) with the value IE=7 will enable this mode too.

Standards Compatible webpages by default will display using IE8's enhanced Standards Mode and currently supports more CSS2.1 features including the content property, counters, outlines, full Paged CSS and CSS Tables. The proprietary hasLayout, the source of many CSS bugs in IE, has been removed. IE finally respects the CSS Vendor-Specific Mechanism with the prefix -ms-. The CSS3 experimental -ms-box-sizing has been added to handle CSS layout sizing. Plus the writing-mode is now a CSS3 property.

HTML updates include the ability to bring in images through <object> properly and several fixes to its existing DOM support. Plus HTML 5 additions including window.location.hash to allow a history of changes within the same document for improved Web Application navigation. HTML 5's storage support allows a webpage or web application to store information beyond the limitations of cookies.

Features still need improving for IE 8:

  • Restore list-style-image and advanced border properties,
  • More CSS3 including:
    • Some form of border-radius,
    • Some form of opacity (ActivX's opacity is disqualified as it is not proper CSS),
    • Multiple Background Images,
  • From Web Forms 2:
    • <input type="email">,
    • required and pattern attributes for <input>,
    • required, pattern and maxlength attributes for <textarea></textarea>.

Maybe in later builds.

Plus general improvements for the future:

  • Some more DOM 2 support,
  • More HTML 5 and DOM 5 HTML support.

Development of the Unix Edition of IE ended at version 5.01 many years ago and the Mac Editions (Tasman) have also ended at 5.1.7 for Classic Mac and 5.2.3 for Mac OS X and are no longer available. IE for Windows 95 ended at version 5.5 Service Pack 2 and for Windows 98, NT4, 2000 and Millennium Edition (ME) ended at version 6 Service Pack 1. Version 6 Service Pack 2 is available for Windows XP and Server 2003.
Internet Explorer features are heavily used by the Windows Operating System since Windows 98. The security and bug fix improvements have been the main focus of the latest browser developments. Now Web Standards and continued security are the focus of Internet Explorer 8.

IE does not pass the Acid 2 Test which tests Cascade Stylesheet (CSS) support. The upcoming IE 8 does pass this test. More about the Acid 2 Test from the Web Standards Project (WASP).
IE 6 also clocks 11, IE 7 clocks 12 and IE 8 Beta clocks 17 or 18 out of 100 from the Acid 3 Test which tests DOM, scripting, HTML, SVG and various other technologies for Web 2.0. More about the Acid 3 Test from the Web Standards Project (WASP).

To download Microsoft's Internet Explorer you can go to its official website.

Copyright ©2005-2008 Legend Scrolls and Peter Davison.
The Globe and Konqueror icons from Crystal Project Icons: LGPL, Copyright © Everaldo.
All rights reserved.