XML News from Friday, November 18, 2005

I've posted my slides from Wednesday's talk on Testing XML at STARWest.

Automatic Update just informed me that the Mozilla Project has posted the third release candidate of Firefox 1.5. If you've been using one of the 1.5 betas, it may already be downloading now as you read this. New features in 1.5 for XML developers include:

CSS @-moz-document selector for matching on site/document URL, useful in user stylesheets
SVG support is now turned on by default.
XML Events in JavaScript
An extension to support XForms
CSS 2 quotes support
CSS 2 counters support
Lots of neat CSS 3 features
URIs are now always encoded in UTF-8

Other new features in 1.5 include:

Sanitize "provides an easy way to quickly remove browsing history, cookies, cache, saved form information, and other personal data. The items to be removed can be customized, and the feature can be activated using either a keyboard shortcut or through a menu item."
When viewing images, tab icons now display thumbnails of the displayed image.
"Much faster session history navigation. The feature is off by default but can be enabled for testing purposes by setting the browser.sessionhistory.max_viewers preference to a nonzero number."
FTP users are prompted for a name and password if anonymous access fails.
Report a broken website wizard
Changes made in the Preferences window now apply immediately
Searchable download actions manager
Searchable cookie manager

I've been using this version since the alpha 2 release a few months ago. It feels a little slower than 1.0 but otherwise has been quite stable.