Microsoft released Internet Explorer 5.5 this week to mixed reviews

According to Microsoft, Internet Explorer 5.5 provides:

"improved support for DHTML and CSS, giving Web architects greater control over browser appearance and behavior. You’ll also enjoy the ability to preview Web pages exactly as they’ll appear when printed"

eWeek's Jim Rapoza was less than impressed, noting that:

"these enhancements serve to worsen IE's support for the Document Object Model, which, unlike DHTML, is an accepted standard. It is also a bad omen for the .Net initiative, which is centered on XML (Extensible Markup Language), that Microsoft is falling behind on support for the XML-based DOM. On the plus side, IE 5.5 supports Cascading Style Sheets 1 more effectively than earlier versions of the browser do, but the support is still incomplete."

Elliotte Rusty Harold found fault with relatively basic XML processing, concluding that:

"I cut Microsoft a lot of slack for IE5, probably more than I should have... At this point, I can only attribute their failure to incompetence or malice. Take your pick. "

XML-Dev also questioned (0 1 2 3 4 5 6) IE 5.5's support for XML.

Better XML support may be on the way, as new versions of the MSXML parser are in preview release.