Create a Push Site in a Day
By Michael Floyd
As I was placing the final brush strokes on this month's column, Michael Wallent of Microsoft stopped by to show off the company's latest Developer Preview of Internet Explorer 5.0. Some of you may know Wallent as the DHTML Dude on the SiteBuilder Web site. What you may not know is that Wallent is also the group program manager for Internet Explorer.
No matter what your opinion of Internet Explorer or Microsoft, the new browser sports some very interesting features. As you might guess, I zeroed in on the improvements to the XML parser, which will now include Document Type Definition (DTD) validation and comply with the W3C's XML 1.0 Recommendation. For Web developers, IE5 lets you include XML directly in your HTML documents as either data or metadata. You do this by wrapping your markup either within a new <XML> tag, or by using the old script tag (<script language=XML>). This exposes your XML to the Document Object Model (meaning you can access it programmatically), but does not render the XML markup. To render your XML markup, you need to apply style sheets to it.
The phrase "eating your own dog food" was coined by the software development community to describe a company's use of its own tools for internal development. When it comes to using XML, Microsoft is certainly eating its own. Internet Explorer implements an XML-based storage methodology to save user data. This "UserData" can be used as a replacement for cookies, which means you can now overcome the 4K limit.
