Outer Court

Tech - MSIE5

Here's some developer background on MSIE5 (Microsoft Internet Explorer 5) and changes in the new version (you need to know about DHTML already). If you have XML/XSL or VML sample pages you'd like to share please email them to me.

First Look

This time you can keep version 4 intact when installing v5. There will be some slight changes. Like, if I know choose a favorite, v4 tries to open the page with the program associated with it from Explorer/ Windows, which doesn't make sense. When I go on options, the Windows System folder pops up, which neither makes much sense. But the v4 page rendering seems to have stayed the same

The overall feel of v5 program is the same. Toolbars are a little more configurable. If you switch between two relatively similar pages you get a white blink which doesn't disappear if you turn off the show page loading option. If you change from one page to another in v4 you ony see altering of parts that really changed.

With v5 you can now safe a file with all inline images. This new version reformats both HTML (not only the SRC-values) and CSS (background-images linked to from the stylesheet are not safed). The new HTML will for example remove closing tags when they're optional for elements like lists <li>. This is especially interesting as MS says you can speed up page-loading in IE if you don't leave out these optional closing tags.

'Favorites' Icon

When you add a favorite v5 remembers a complete frameset's content pages. A site can provide an icon to show up in the favorite list or address field (by putting a "favicon.ico" in the folder). You can see this effect at work when you bookmark a page on this site with MSIE5.

HTA's

When you rename the extension of an html file to "HTA" and open it locally it's shown as browser-window without status-bar and so on.

Hiding HTML

If you write things you know only MSIE5 will support you can now write this:

<!--[if IE 5]>
Only Explorer v5 will see this
<![endif]-->
                                                                                               
<![if ! IE 5]>
Explorer v5 will be the only one not seeing this
<![endif]>

Continue with: DOM.

 
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