14 DAY TRIAL // Internet Explorer 10, the default browser in Windows 8, comes with a series of enhancements over the previous flavors of the application, many of which have been introduced in the latest flavor of the platform, Windows 8 Release Preview.
Among them, there is an update to the responseXML from an XMLHttpRequest to return a native XML document by default, Tony Ross, program manager, Internet Explorer, explains.
Through this change, which has been introduced in IE10 Release Preview and which affects its Standards and Quirks document modes, results in interoperability with modern browsers and is also consistent with a “same markup” approach.
According to Tony Ross, the change could affect sites that were expecting responseXML to contain an MSXML document and which were dependent on MSXML-specific functionality such as selectNodes.
“In these cases, you may request that IE10 return an MSXML by setting the responseType member of your XMLHttpRequest object to 'msxml-document'. If your code does not depend on MSXML-specific functionality, IE10’s native XML document should work for you,” Ross explains.
IE9 brought along DOM parity to XML and HTML courtesy of native XML support. Moreover, it made it possible for XML fragments to be inserted and rendered directly in pages.
The browser also made it easier for converting between XML and DOM through DOMParser and XMLSerializer. IE10 brings this one step further, with the update to responseXML to return a native XML document. This post on the IEBlog offers some more info on the matter. Another post on the same website unveils the fact that IE10 has been packed with a new Blob Constructor in Release Preview.
IE10 also comes with “support for a BlobBuilder interface, an in-progress interface in the File API: Writer W3C Working Draft,” Sharon Newman, program manager, Internet Explorer, explains. “This interface enables developers to work with files on the client PC. Recently, the W3C working group deprecated the BlobBuilder interface in favor of a new Blob constructor.”
Web developers can take advantage of both the Blob constructor and the BlobBuilder interface to come up with files on the client.
However, there is a difference in syntax between the two, since the Blob constructor can take an array of arguments at the same time, while the BlobBuilder requires for each piece of the blob to be appended through separate calls to the method.
Developers can use the feature detection to determine whether the Blob constructor is available in the browser in which code is running. Additional info on the matter, as well as on the differences between the Blob constructor and the BlobBuilder can be found in the aforementioned blog post.