facts, conclusions, and exhortations re XML (long)

[Jelks Cabaniss]

Clark C. Evans wrote:

> Surely Microsoft (the well-funded pre-release alpha software giant) has:
>
> 1. Announced (several months in advance) about their upcoming Explorer,
>    detailing how it will closely follow the W3C's recommendatoins.

AFAIK there has been no public announcement of the availability of the next
version of IE.  They just released IE 5.01, which has some bug fixes, most
notably that general entities are now displayed when a CSS stylesheet is applied
(before, with IE 5.0, such entities were "invisible" :).

Microsoft has committed to supporting XPath and XSLT.  See:

	http://www.w3.org/1999/11/xslt-xpath-test#Microsoft

Of course, they also said when HTML 4.0 was released that "Microsoft fully
supports HTML 4.0", yet you couldn't find a valid page on their entire site
(Marketing droids.  Depends on what the meaning of "fully supports" is...).
We'll see.  I'll venture that they will match their deeds to their words this
time around.  The focus is different, and they did, after all, participate
significantly in the development XSLT/XPath.

As to *when*, that's a million dollar question.  There are lots of other
factors: XHTML 1.x, schemas, XLink, etc., that are all fast moving targets.  And
there's the roll-out of Windows 2000 in February.

Next year is going to make for, well, an interesting landscape: IE 5.5 (or 6, or
whatever), Netscape 5.0, and Opera 4.0.

/Jelks


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