Microsoft counters with IE 4

Seybold Report on Internet Publishing
Vol 2, No 3

But Microsoft was not to be outdone so easily. The next day, it unleashed Internet Explorer 4.0. Among the key enhancements in the new release: two built-in XML parsers—one in Java and one in C—the necessary ingredients for a browser to interpret and display XML-tagged documents.

The following day, Bill Gates gave a concrete example of why XML is interesting. Using the Wall Street Journal Interactive as his example, Gates showed how document views might be updated at the client, without returning to the server. He also noted that with granular tagging, publishers will be able to update portions of pages without resending the whole file. In both cases, the customer sees faster response times, making XML an interesting technology for anyone involved in the Web.

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