This is not a review of Internet Explorer 5.5 - HTML with Style | 7
This is not a review of Internet Explorer 5.5
The Rest of the Gang
In addition to the changes in HTML and CSS support, IE5.5/Win has a few other features that have appeared. The most amusing one is, by far, colored scroll bars. Yes that's right, you can now sleep at night as you can change the color of scrollbars on your Web pages and form controls to your liking.
There are also a few proprietary extensions such as popups, which allow you to display HTML content outside the viewport, anywhere on the user's screen. I can't wait until the porn sites get a load of this one - you'll think onUnload scripts that open ten more windows were a walk in the park. You can also zoom in on particular parts of a document. Another Big Thing is a bunch of new features for "DHTML Behaviors," that wonderful little technology that I've always hated and others love. JavaScript junkies will have fun with these, I'm sure, but I'm thinking that the last time anyone extended a completely unsuitable language and dragged it kicking and screaming into a different programming paradigm we got C++, and look where that got us. But I digress.
To be perfectly honest, some of these things are way out of my field of expertise, in that they're the kind of thing I check out, learn how to use, and vow never to put on a Web page unless someone asks me very politely while holding a loaded high-caliber weapon to my head. The one thing I can tell you is that all of this stuff is proprietary, IE-only stuff that won't work with anything else and probably never will, so if you want to learn more about them, run over to this article on MSDN Web Workshop and feast on the demos.
The one thing that I will mention here that basically doesn't fit anywhere else is that IE5.5/Win now handles inline frames (the IFRAME element) much better, basically allowing you to use the z-index property to stack them below other elements in your page. This is a welcome (yet minor) improvement in both HTML and CSS support.
URL: https://www.webreference.com/html/watch/ie55/6.html
Produced by Stephanos Piperoglou
Created: August 03, 2000
Revised: August 8, 2000
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