This is not a review of Internet Explorer 5.5
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I Said, This is not a Re... oh, for God's Sake
So, is this a review of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows? I don't know. Last time I claimed to review the newborn spawn of Redmond, I got enough mail accusing me of "Microsoft bashing" I had to crawl under the table and whimper for a few hours. But then again, I got about the same amount of mail praising me for an objective opinion.
"Objective opinion," get it? I thought it was a joke too. But you people were serious. I suddenly realized that a whole lot of people expected me to pronounce Internet Explorer 5.0 as Worthy or Not Worthy, and also expected that pronouncement to stick. So, none of that this time around; this article is just an account of my brief experience with Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows and my thoughts on it. No edict, no conviction, no sentence passed. I am a Web site developer; more than that, I teach Web site development. And the latest Web browser from Microsoft, who just happens to be the market leader by a sizeable margin, just made my life a whole lot harder. Guess what? I'm biased. This means, I have reasons to dislike IE5.5/Win. Are these reasons valid? That's for you to decide. Should these reasons affect your decisions? Ditto. I'm just this guy with a podium and a thing for using it. Some people like to listen. Some of them even like what they hear. End of story.
These days, everyone and his hamster has an opinion about Microsoft. The recent legal trouble has caused quite an uproar (I thought of providing a link with useful information on said legal trouble, but decided against it. Apologies to those readers who only recently arrived on our little blue planet and will have to find out about it without my help) and it's not just Linux fundamentalists and cranky CSS academics that complain about Microsoft anymore.
So, what's in this article? First, let me mention what isn't in this article: There is no review of IE5.5/Win's end-user experience. No mention of user interface enhancements. What I'm interested is what IE5.5/Win allows developers to do. Primarily, I'm interested in what it allows developers to do with HTML and CSS, though I'll mention a few other technologies as well. If you're looking for an opinion on whether or not you should start using IE5.5/Win for browsing, look elsewhere. If you're looking for information on how IE5.5/Win is going to change the way you develop Web pages, this is the place to find it.
