More on authoring for Internet Explorer 5.0 this month, as we show you how to create your own tags, and investigate IE5's Persistence Behaviors (no, they're not a timeshare sales technique, they're 'super-cookies' which let you store data on your users' hard disks!). Paul Stephens
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You'll
find some exotic descriptions of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) on the
Web, but for me at least, the phrase "tags you make up yourself"
sums it up. IE5 has built-in XML support, which means you can declare your
own tagnames at the start of a document, then use them like ordinary HTML
tags in the document body.
The effect is really no different to associating standard HTML tags
(such as <DIV>s) with style classes, but the tags look impressive,
and have the advantage of being completely ignored by other browsers, making
them a good way to implement IE5-only event handling routines. The
Custom
Tags Guide
explains all, with examples. The special-purpose persistence features let you add data to IE5 Favorites (bookmark) files, make pages 'remember' object properties as you browse between them, and embed data in the web page source files created by IE's Save As command. The general-purpose persistence feature lets you store simple data items and retrieve them in other pages, just like cookies, but allows a more generous 64K of data per page, and 640K per web site domain. It can also create multi-level structured XML data stores - although I've stuck to simple data items here! See the Persistence Guide for details.
Until next month, happy authoring! |