Microsoft today
at its Professional Developers Conference showcased the latest Extensible
Markup Language (XML) technologies it will be including in Microsoft
Internet Explorer 5 and Microsoft Windows.
These new technologies include XML 1.0, XSL, XML DOM and XML Namespaces.
As such, Microsoft will become the first major browser vendor to
incorporate support for many of the latest XML specifications to come out
of the World Wide Web Consortium. Microsoft
continues to help to define the emerging XML standard as defined by the
World Wide Web Consortium.
Microsoft’s support for XML will include the following key features:
- Direct viewing of XML – enables users to view XML using XSL or
Cascading Style Sheets using their Web browser
- High-performance, validating XML engine – the XML engine has been
substantially enhanced and fully supports W3C XML 1.0 and XML Namespaces
- Extensible Style Language (XSL) support – developers can apply style
sheets to XML data and display the data in a customized
- XML Schemas – schemas define the rules of an XML document, including
element names and rich data types, which elements can appear in
combination, and which attributes are available for each element
- Server-side XML – server-side XML processing enables XML to be used as a
standard means of passing data between multiple distributed application
servers
- XML document object model (DOM) – the DOM is a standard object
application programming interface that gives developers programmatic
control of XML document content, structure, formats and more
Additionally, Microsoft is using XML in its applications software,
including the upcoming release of Microsoft Office 2000, which elevates
HTML to a companion file format and utilizes XML to store additional
document information.
For more information about Microsoft’s support of XML, visit the Microsoft
XML Standards Page.
