Getting Ready for Internet Explorer 3.0

Microsoft Developer Relations Group

Updated: April 1996

This document refers to the following documents on Web servers not associated Microsoft. (Note that these links point to servers that are not under Microsoft's control. Please read Microsoft's official statement regarding other servers.)

W3Cinternet link Working Draft: "Cascading Style Sheets, level 1"internet link
W3Cinternet link Working Draft: "Inserting objects into HTML"internet link
W3Cinternet link Working Draft: "HTML3 Scripting"internet link
W3Cinternet link Working Draft: "The HTML3 Table Model"internet link

With Microsoft Internet Explorer version 3.0, Microsoft will present to the Internet community a Web browser that not only adheres to the standards that are being designed for Web-based documentation, but is also an advanced browser that shows Microsoft's dedication and commitment to providing Internet-based solutions.

Many of the emerging standards for HTML and Web-based documentation are coming out of the "Word Wide Web Consortium"internet link (W3C). This is an organization that is comprised of representatives from a broad range of Internet-related companies and individuals. They realize that it is important to provide clear and concise standards that not only extend the creative capabilites of the Internet, but also maintain a level of standards that will ensure the greatest level of compatibility among a large number of browsers and other Web-related applications.

Many of you are probably nose-down in working on a current site or project, and may not have time to redesign your site to follow these evolving standards, much less take the time to read all of the specifications. Here on this page, I'll try to present the key aspects of the standards that will be supported by Internet Explorer version 3.0, with pointers to additional information that you can read when you have the time.

HTML with Style

Probably one of the most important new developments for Web-based documentation is the specification for "Cascading Style Sheets"internet link. This provides a clean and specific mechanism for adding layout and visual formatting information to a document, without impacting its ability to be used with back-level browsers that may understand only strict HTML 2.0 tags and attributes.

Style information is applied to an HTML document within a seperate <STYLE> section of the file, or specified as the extended STYLE attribute within an existing tag.

At the simplest level, you can specify styles that affect things like boldness, italics, alignment, and font size. To dive in a little deeper, you can also select the type of font to use, the color of both the text and the background color for individual elements on a page, or even a bitmap image to display underneath a particular paragraph. If you want to get even fancier, you create such special effects as drop caps, special formatting for only the first line of a paragraph, or control both the vertical and horizontal layout of individual page elements.

Here is a very simple example of what it might look like to add style sheet information to your pages:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Title</TITLE>
<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
BODY {font-family: arial; background: #FF0000}
.punk {color: #00FF00}
</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1 CLASS="punk" STYLE="font-size:24pt">Way too green</H1>
</BODY>
</HTML>

The scope and capabilities of Cascading Style Sheets is well beyond the ability to describe here in only a couple of paragraphs; you really should take a look at the specificationinternet link to get a good idea of how you can use this on your pages.

Web Objects

One of the major themes cropping up within the various browsers lately is how to insert some external object into a document. The first example of this is the <IMG> tag, which is used in almost all Web documents for inserting a graphical element from a secondary data file. Recently, support for additional special tags and attributes have been cropping up in various browsers as people try to solve various problems. DYNSRC, APPLET, and EMBED: all of these are mechanisms for inserting external data into a document. Some, like DYNSRC and APPLET, support a notion of backward compatibility, while others, like EMBED, do not.

The W3C commitee sees this as a problem that needs to be solved in a manner that will provide compatibility among the various browsers that are available. They have written up a draft specificationinternet link for a new HTML tag. The <OBJECT> tag is designed to allow a rich and extensive model of adding secondary data elements to a page, and to also support the notion of backward compatibility with older browsers.

Here is an example of how usage of the <OBJECT> tag might look for adding a custom animation to a page:

<OBJECT
 DATA="animation.ani"
 TYPE="application/animate"
 CODEBASE="http://www.site.com/app/animate.inf"
 WIDTH=288 HEIGHT=200>
<PARAM NAME="speed" VALUE="medium">
<IMG
 SRC="animation.gif"
 DYNSRC="animation.avi"
 WIDTH=288
 HEIGHT=200
 ALT="Pretend you see an animation here">
</OBJECT>
If there is already an installed application that is associated with the mime type of "application/animate" (or the .ANI extension) it will get added to the page, and read in the information from ANIMATION.ANI. If there is no application associated with this, then the location of "http://www.site.com/app/animate.inf" will be used to install the components necessary. Once the object is installed, created, and added to the page, the information in any following <PARAM> tags will be used to assign various values and properties of the object. The closing </OBJECT> tag is a required tag to indicate the end of the object and any elements with which it is associated.

You might notice the <IMG> tag that is within the <OBJECT> container. Since the only allowed tags within an <OBJECT> container are <PARAM> or <OBJECT>, any other HTML tags will be ignored. A benefit of this is that in a browser that's unaware of the <OBJECT> tag, the only information in the above code fragment that it will see will be the <IMG> tag. Thus an object-aware browser will show the object, and not the image, and an object-unaware browser will show the image, and not the object. The image will also be shown on an object-aware browser if the specified object was not able to be created for some reason.

Follow the Script internet link

Another one of the specifications being worked on by the W3C committee is the definition of scripting support within HTML. Sun and Netscape have already released browsers that allow Java™-based scripting to be added to their brand of HTML. The W3C committee is working on defining a standard scripting model that will allow multiple scripting languages to be supportable within the HTML language specification.

Here is an example of using the <SCRIPT> tag to add some VBScript code to your page:

<FORM NAME="SampleForm">
<INPUT TYPE="BUTTON" NAME="button1" VALUE="button">
<INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="text1" SIZE=50>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="VBS">
Sub Button1_OnClick
 Dim Button
 Dim Text
 Set Button = Document.SampleForm.Button1
 Set Text = Document.SampleForm.Text1
 If Button.Value="click" Then
  Button.Value="CLICK"
 Else
  Button.Value = "click"
 End If
 Text.Value = Button.name & " was " & Button.value & "ed"
End Sub
</SCRIPT>
</FORM>

When looking through the W3C specificationinternet link you will notice that they are defining not only the various aspects and methods of specifying a script to be associated with an HTML document, but also a rich, robust set of methods and events that will allow a wide variety of capabilities for a Web page.

Of Tags and Attributes

In the above sections, I've covered the support being added Internet Explorer (IE) for the <STYLE>, <OBJECT>, and <SCRIPT> tags. Support is being added to IE 3.0 that allows it to support not only some other emerging standards on the Web, but also various tags and attributes that have been added to other browsers.

In addition to added support for frames via the <FRAME>, <FRAMESET> and <NOFRAMES> tags, IE 3.0 will also fully support tables as specified in the W3C Working Draft: "The HTML3 Table Model"internet link. For further information on what tags and attributes will be supported in IE 3.0, please refer to our online HTML documentation.

Robert B. Hess
roberth@microsoft.com
One Microsoft Way
Redmond WA, 98052-6399
© 1996 Microsoft Corporation