“Microsoft finally shipped Version 5.0 of its Internet Explorer
Web browser on Thursday, March 18. The product has numerous
incremental improvements that users will probably find interesting
and helpful. At the same time, the new release has the potential to
make the lives of Web builders even more complicated, if that’s
possible.
While CNET.com reviewed the new browser from the user’s
perspective, this article’s focus is on the viewpoint of the poor
saps who have to build the Web sites that users get to visit with
this new browser edition. For us, the news, while not entirely bad,
is nonetheless disappointing. Microsoft has fallen well short of
its promises to support World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards,
particularly in its selective, fragmentary, and unhelpful support
for the Document Object Model (DOM). After running a copy of the
final-release version of IE 5.0 for several days on dozens of sites
and putting the product through literally hundreds of tests, I can
say with some confidence that Web builders who have to design sites
for multiple browsers are going to want to lay in a big stock of
headache remedies if they add IE 5.0 to that list.”