A lot of developers have been talking about it for months, so it is not with much fanfare we celebrate the news. Internet Explorer 7 has finally been released in its “polished”? state for the general public to consume. There’s no telling when Windows XP will start automatically issuing the browser through its built-in Windows Update feature, but I’m guessing it might be soon. Meantime, web designers the world over are scrambling to make sure their sites perform as intended in IE7 (Talk bugs, hacks, and more at Zeldman.com). And it’s not just Microsoft that’s turning up the heat. Last Tuesday, the Internet Explorer team in Redmond sent a cake to the Firefox team at Mozilla to congratulate them on their Firefox 2.0 — this developer’s browser of choice — official release.

Poor XSL
One of the reasons I’m discontent with the three biggies — Safari, IE7, and Firefox 2 — is their apparent blatant disregard for a designer’s freedom to exercise his or her right to a custom XSL—styled XML feed. I don’t normally spend too much time writing XSL documents, but for one client’s particular requirement, they wanted a custom XML feed page. The client’s user base, we anticipated, was not RSS-savvy and we’d hoped to ease them into the process for consuming news, regular updates, and more. So, enter a fairly simple XSL style sheet and the über—friendly appearance of styled XML. Not so in the latest versions of these browsers.

It’s possible that I haven’t yet found the setting in the browser preferences or the line of code that fixes it, but the aforementioned Big Three are overriding my XSL! (Opera handles the XML as intended.) They favor their own display of RSS feeds and bully mine out of the way. (See theirs. See mine.)

I’m not even going to try to explain why the software makers decided on this, so if you know of a fix, let me know.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 10 am and is filed under browsers, code, css, design, mac, websites, windows.