Microsoft Internet Explorer and XML

Stuck in an HTML legacy

Internet Explorer 4 leapfrogged the competition Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 was the first browser that looked like it might fit with the W3C's idea of a browser. It supported HTML and CSS relatively strongly, and included Dynamic HTML capabilities through a forerunner of the Document Object Model (DOM). For its day, it was very impressive. It also included some tools for manipulating XML with scripts and Java.
Internet Explorer 5 integrated XML With version 5, Microsoft integrated the MSXML parser into IE, added an implementation of its original Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Note, and provided support for viewing XML documents with XSL or CSS.
Incomplete integration Microsoft's XML+CSS implementation has been notoriously buggy - in the initial release, users couldn't print! Even today, XML documents which include entity references don't work well. Microsoft's out-of-date XSL has kept developers confused as well, as have glitches in its Namespaces implementation.
Improving the parser, but not yet the browser The latest MSXML improves XML and Namespaces conformance, and replaces the old XSL with the new XSLT. It's not yet distributed with IE, however.