Hello everyone, my name is Charles Morris and I’m a program manager on the IE Mobile team. One of the most frequent questions that we get is around which standards are supported by our browser, so we thought it would be helpful to write up a blog post to pull it all together.
Standards Support Overview
Here is a high level summary of which levels of various standards are supported by IE Mobile:
- HTML: 4.01
- XHTML: Basic, 1.01 (with some exceptions)
- WAP: 1.2.1, 2.0
- CSS: Level 1, Level 2 (partial), Mobile Profile 1.0, Wireless (WAP) CSS 1.1
- Scripting/DOM: JScript 5.6, DOM Level 0, DOM Level 1 (partial), DOM Level 2 (partial)
There are more details on IE Mobile standards support up on MSDN.
Although AJAX is not a standard, we are often also asked if we “support AJAX” in this context. As mentioned in earlier blog posts, IE Mobile does support the XMLHTTP object used to exchange data with the server asynchronously, as well as the DOM/CSS support listed above to update your page dynamically with the new data.
Reference Documentation
Of course, high-level summaries don’t do you much good if you are trying to find out if the browser supports a specific tag/object/selector/etc. Luckily, our hard-working documentation team has also assembled detailed reference material for precise answers to those sorts of questions.
Unfortunately those references aren’t always easy to find amongst the mass of information up on MSDN. We hope that things have gotten better with the new content structure for the Windows Mobile 6 Documentation, but just in case here are a few direct links for the most commonly used references:
Note: To find out what methods/properties you can use for a specific HTML element, see Common Properties for HTML Elements as well as the element’s entry in the HTML Element Reference.
What’s New in Windows Mobile 6
Those who have developed web applications for IE Mobile on Windows Mobile 5.0 or earlier versions of the platform may be wondering what specific improvements have been made for the recently released Windows Mobile 6. So, here is a list of the standards-related improvements that were made for this release:
HTML Element Support
- <hr> color support
- <iframe> support
- <button> support
CSS Support
- -wap-marquee support
- list-style-image support
- E > F support
- E + F support
Script/DOM Support
- Feature detection
- Custom properties
- element.className
- element.parentNode
- element.childNodes
- element.appendChild()
- element.id (now writeable)
- element.insertBefore()
- element.removeChild()
- element.replaceChild()
- document.body
- document.createElement()
- document.documentElement
- document.getElementsByTagName()
- document.title (now writeable)
The Future
The IE Mobile team is committed to continuing improvements to standards support in our browser for future releases. Unfortunately, I can’t give out any specifics at this time but do watch this space!
-Charles
