Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 12:14:35 GMT

More or less in the random thoughts category, but have MSXML's problems with XHTML 1.1 ( http://www.satoshii.org/markup/dtd/xhtml11-msxml.en ) been entirely resolved (and, if so, in which version)?

Best practices with MSXML on the browser

Data — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 22:34:51 GMT

Adam Wiener, Lead Program Manager for Data Programmability / XML Technologies, has worked closely with

Best practices with MSXML on the browser

alexbarnett.net blog — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:21:57 GMT

Adam Wiener, Lead Program Manager for Data Programmability / XML Technologies, has worked closely with

MSXML5...Not in This IE

IEBlog — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 22:00:22 GMT

Some of you may have noticed the following goldbar on some websites: Our friend Adam on the XML team

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

Andrew Eberhard — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 23:23:33 GMT

Hi Adam,

Thanks for the great post. Some of the mud is getting clearer! I have a very large AJAX application (well, suite of applications) that together comprise a corporate intranet (I'll omit the company). Currently that site is set to use MSXML4 SP2. If I change my <object> tags to install the MSXML6 CAB and if I change my ProgIDs to the 6.0 equivalents, what kind of compatibility problems am I likely to encounter? Is there a comparison document/table between the latest MSXML 6 and MSXML4 SP2 that I can refer to in order to assess the risk of such a transition?

Thanks!

Andrew Eberhard

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

Joe Fawcett — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 11:27:46 GMT

Adam

Could you point out about XSLPattern versus XPath in version 3.0? I find this to be one of the commonest causes for code failing when working with different versions.

Joe

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

R.N. (Roger) Folsom — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 06:19:32 GMT

I run Windows 2000 Professional Sp4, and I much appreciate your clarification that MSXML 4 Sp2 is NOT the preferred fallback MSXML version below MSXML 6.0.

So I will upgrade my three Win2k computers to MSXML 6.0 (without the SDK since I am not a software developer in any way), provided that MSXML 6.0 works not only with MSIE 7 (which I believe will not be available for Win2k) but also with MSIE 6 Sp1 in Win2k.

I urge you to explicitly include somewhere that MSXML 6.0 DOES (or does not) work with MSIE 6 Sp1.

Thanks.

Roger Folsom

rnfolsom@netscape.net

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

Laurens van den Oever — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 13:57:07 GMT

Thanks for this post, it explains some of the issues we had with our xml editor (Xopus) in IE7.

However, your statement to use either MSXML3 or MSXML6 contradicts my experiences. In Xopus we need XMLHTTPRequest, XSLT 1.0 support and SchemaCache.

AFAIK doesn't MSXML3 fully support XSLT 1.0 and has no SchemaCache object so we can't use it.

MSXML4 and 5 work well for us, Office 2003 is widely spread, especially amongst our user base. We haven't had issues with MSXML5 due to it's specialization towards Office.

MSXML6 has breaking changes in SchemaCache (Support for Partial Schemas and Schema flattening) that requires us to rearchitecture our validation infrastructure. We haven't found the resources to do this yet.

So we ended up supporting only MSXML4 and 5, the exact opposite of what you're suggesting. Now with IE7 we seem to be forced to drop MSXML5 support as well.

Why shouldn't we support MSXML4, MSXML5 only in IE6 and MSXML6 as soon as possible?

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

rubo — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 17:21:08 GMT

Huge thanks for clarification... Good and very helpful article.

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

XmlTeam — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 05:25:57 GMT

Benjamin, XHTML support is something we're looking at right now in both MSXML and System.Xml. Thanks for the great pointer to the analysis on the Satoshii site - I love getting the feedback on what people are experiencing with our products in the real world. The IGNORE issue is still there and we don't support HTML entities without a declaration in the DTD (&nbsp is the most famous). In terms of resolving externals we will resolve relative to the resource URL in MSXML6 - it simplifies our security model particularly in the browser and ensures malicious documents can't harm browsers when they are surfing.

Best Regards,

Adam Wiener

Lead Program Manager

Data Programmability / XML Technologies

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

XmlTeam — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 05:28:55 GMT

To Joe and Laurens - thanks for your insight. I'll edit the main post to take your feedback into account. Thanks for sharing and helping to broaden our best practices guidance for everyone.

Best Regards,

Adam Wiener

Lead Program Manager

Data Programmability / XML Technologies

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

pwb — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 05:29:58 GMT

What's the recommendation for distribting a solution that calls XMLHTTPRequest (ie, I do not control the users environment and am looking for the broadest current support)?

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

pwb — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 05:31:11 GMT

ie. what's the best Curl-equivalent for Classic ASP?

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

XmlTeam — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 05:34:45 GMT

To Roger, MSXML6 will work with any supported version of IE6 as well as IE7. If you do take the time to install it, any pages that use the "fallback" method above will be able to take advantage of your shiny new installation of MSXML6.

Best Regards,

Adam Wiener

Lead Program Manager

Data Programmability / XML Technologies

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

XmlTeam — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 05:58:38 GMT

Hi Andrew, right now we don't support CAB installation for MSXML6. But we've heard from a bunch of folks now that this is an important scenario so we're looking at wrapping our existing installer. In terms of migration between 4.0 and 6.0 you can look at the "Things to watch out for" section above and also look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/xmlsdk/html/cb34f1f0-c235-4d6c-8fc0-1c337dadb56f.asp to see what's new in MSXML 6.0

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

XmlTeam — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 06:12:29 GMT

pwb, using the 'Msxml2.XMLHTTP.3.0' ProgID will give you support on Win2k SP4 and up and IE 6 or IE 7.

IE7 also have support for 'native' XMLHTTPRequest that can be used without instantiating ActiveX objects. Check out this post from the folks in IE for good cross-browser support - http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/01/23/516393.aspx

(Just one note that the example in the IE page uses an older ProgID in the ActiveX case - you should use 'Msxml2.XMLHTTP.3.0')

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

Alex — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 09:53:20 GMT

I authored pages that runs well on MSXML 3 and 4. They die miserably in 6. The key area is, my XSL xsl:incude other XSLs, and it seems it fails in 6. Is there any place I can find documentations and resources to tackle these problems?

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

Alex — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 10:08:26 GMT

PS. I've read

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/xmlsdk/html/ba3e4d4f-1ee7-4226-a51a-78a1f1b5bd8a.asp

and my code already reads

doc.setProperty("NewParser", true ); // 4.0 only

doc.setProperty("AllowXsltScript", true);

doc.setProperty("AllowDocumentFunction", true);

doc.resolveExternals = true;

but I keep getting errors like

Named template 'entities' does not exist in the stylesheet.

(my main xsl has a xsl:inlude to an entites.xsl)

Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

Stuart Jones Weblog — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 16:55:55 GMT

Adam Wiener has a blog post that explains the often confusing issue of which version of the MSXML parser...

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

Michael Slama — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 22:04:25 GMT

Our AJAX application was trying to instantiate msxml2.xmlhttp.5.0, then falling back to msxml2.xmlhttp.3.0. After installing the MS06-061 Security patch we were no longer able to read the responseText of our XHR objects using xmlhttp.5.0 when the http status was 400.

This forced us to change to either msxml2.xmlhttp.6.0 or msxml2.xmlhttp.3.0 objects (for future releases), but breaks all of our existing MS Office customers with the security patch installed.

The existing, functioning file @ Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/OFFICE11/msxml5.dll was replaced with version 5.10.2930.0.

Has anyone else had problems with this?

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

Erik Arvidsson — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 01:10:52 GMT

What about IE5.0 and Win9x?

The list at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/269238 makes it even more confusing to me. From that it seems IE5.0x does not even support MSXML2 out of the box?

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

XmlTeam — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 04:53:11 GMT

Hi Michael, I'm not sure why you would be expecting a response body in the 400 case ("bad request" per http://ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt) Does it contain error information? If you send us a little repro of your code we can take a quick look - use the email link at the top of the page to get in touch with us directly. If you can also give us your client / server OS and what web server you're running against that would be great.

Best Regards,

Adam Wiener

Lead Program Manager

XML Technologies / Data Programmability

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

XmlTeam — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 04:59:51 GMT

Hi Erik, in general Win9x is no longer in support - see http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=6513 for details.

In terms of what IE will support and what ships in the box with IE are two different things. For example IE6 ships with MSXML3 (an old version) but will support MSXML3, 4, 5, and 6 (our guidance is to use 3 or 6). As I mentioned above our goal is to distribute MSXML through Windows so when a new IE hits your machine, scripts in web pages will already be able to take advantage of the latest and greatest MSXML available.

As for KB 269238 I agree it's confusing - I'll work on getting that cleaned up so it reflects the information that we've got here in the blog.

Best Regards,

Adam Wiener

Lead Program Manager

XML Technologies / Data Programmability

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

XmlTeam — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 23:45:42 GMT

Just a note to everyone - I touched based with Alex offline and we figured out the trouble with his app using MSXML6. MSXML6 was fine - there was just one code path where the critical configuration (ResolveExternals=true) was omitted to enable stylesheet inclusion in MSXML6. Thanks to Alex for investigating the issue to help support MSXML6!

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

Carl — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 01:21:50 GMT

I was just wondering on how to determine what version the xmlhttprequest.responsexml would be using in IE7.

As using the code to test for v6 and v3 works, if the v6 .dll is instantated for the document, it seems that it throws an "It is an error to mix objects from different versions of MSXML." when attempting to place a clone of a responsexml subnode into the v6 created document.

The code works if the v3 is used in the javascript to create the document, and import nodes from the responsexml.

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

Attila Szabó — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 15:02:12 GMT

Thank you very much for this article. Most of the Ajax frameworks I saw instantiate MSXML rather incorrectly, this article brings light to this issue.

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

Ron M — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 22:21:46 GMT

I am encountering the exact same as Carl above. I have MSXML 3-6 installed on my machine. MSXML 3 is set as the default in the registry. Is that why the responseXML from the native XmlHttpRequest is an MSXML 3 document? Is there any way to choose what version gets returned other than changing the registry?

The same code that breaks in IE7 with MSXML6 works with IE6 and MSXML 4 & 5. I only downloaded MSXML6 after installing IE7.

Thanks,

Ron

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

Ric — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 17:35:22 GMT

While the inclusion of a native object for xmlhttp is preferred to the ActiveX method, I would like to see this being taken further with a native xmldom object too. The reason for this is to solve the problem that Carl comments on. My situation is as follows:

My xmldom object is created via ActiveX and thus has to have a version specified while my xmlhttp request on IE7 uses the native object, because there is no way to detect the version of msxml that is being used there is a case where an xmldom object and the xmlhttp object will be created by using different versions.

Yes, there are solutions (some may call them 'hacks') to resolve the problem, but in essence (and imo, of course) MS has shown a lack of vision when only porting xmlhttp to native.

Until both xmldom and xmlhttp are both native, I will stick with forcing all IE versions to use ActiveX.

Regards,

Ric.

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

yawnmoth — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 21:55:25 GMT

There's an entry on IEBlog that provides some suggestions as to how to best do xmlhttprequests:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/01/23/516393.aspx

My question is... wouldn't they be better off using Msxml2.XMLHTTP.6.0 / Msxml2.XMLHTTP instead of Microsoft.XMLHTTP?

Also, I have a question about this:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/xmlsdk/html/e5533515-e525-4781-b68b-1ecfefdd1e89.asp?frame=true

It suggests that Microsoft.XMLHTTP is bound MSXML 2. It makes no mention of whether or not Msxml2.XMLHTTP is also bound to MSXML 2 (which would mean that two things would be bound to it), let alone whether or not it's bound to MSXML 1.

If it's not bound to either, how can Msxml2 be version independent? It's not bound to anything greater than MSXML 3, per this blog entry, and if it weren't bound to anything less than MSXML 3, either, it would seem that it is, in fact, quite "version dependent".

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

César Soriano — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 01:14:48 GMT

Necesito con urgencia una versión mas reciente de MSXML para poder trabajar e instalar las actualizaciones mas recientes. gacias.

re: Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer

Felippe Moreira — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 19:01:44 GMT

How I do to run this code?

<html>

<head>

<title>Example 1</title>

</head>

<body>

<h1>Example1</h1>

<p>XML Catalog displayed in an HTML table using IE4.0 XML Data Binding</p>

<applet code=com.ms.xml.dso.XMLDSO.class

width=100%

height=25

id=xmldso>

</applet>

<thead>

<th>Capacity</th>

<th>Price</th>

</thead>

<tr>

</tr>

</table>

</body>

</html>

I have MSXML 6.0 but it's not installed. My system is Windows XP Professional SP1, IE 6.0.

Any answer send mail to felippemms@yahoo.com.br, or felippemms@hotmail.com.br

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