Explorer 7 beta 2 seems to be available. I'm currently downloading it, so I have no test data yet.

I added an "Explorer 7 beta 2" category to the Bug Report. Please report any bug you find; the MSIE team needs you.

One of my fondest W3C DOM wishes is a getElementsByTagNames() method (note the plural "names") that returns elements with several tag names in the order they appear in the document. This is extremely useful in for instance my ToC script which needs all h3s and h4s in the order they appear in the source code.

When I discovered the compareDocumentPosition() method in Level 3 Core, I could finally write a custom script that works in most browsers.

Therefore I now proudly present my new getElementsByTagNames() script. It requires either sourceIndex or compareDocumentPosition to work fully, and since Safari 1.3.2 supports neither the script doesn't sort the elements in this browser.

One of my minor irritations with Mozilla is that it doesn't support a few DOM methods and properties that, though not officially a part of the spec, are nonetheless extremely useful and supported by all other browsers. I'm especially thinking of the contains() method and the children[] nodeList. While going through the more abstruse parts of the Level 3 Core spec today I found a way to add contains() to Mozilla.

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Quite recently Google published the results of its Web Authoring Statistics research, in which about a billion HTML documents were parsed for popular class names, used elements and attributes, use of JavaScript and so on.

Sounds fascinating? You bet. There's just one slight problem: the actual data is totally inaccessible.

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iCab 3.0 is a surprisingly good, independent Mac (OS X and 9!) browser created by Alexander Clauss. It has good (though not perfect) CSS1 and DOM1 support, and to my surprise it even contains a speech browser. More than enough reason to recommend iCab to all Mac users that read my site, and to update my CSS compatibility table.

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I added a page about element dimensions, ie. the actual width and height of HTML elements. It contains a little test plus the inevitable compatibility table.

Please pull your agendas and make a note: @media 2006 will take place on 15 and 16 June in London. Be there.

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My last entry The AJAX response generated a few interesting comments, as well as a thoroughly non-scientific and non-representative poll on the use of the various output formats.

I asked which output format people used. Only a minority of the commenters indicated a clear preference, and their "votes" break down as follows: XML 5 votes, JSON 5 votes, HTML snippets 2 votes, plain text 2 votes, and pure JavaScript 1 vote. So it's clear that XML and JSON are currently the most popular output formats. I'd expected JSON to end slightly below XML, but I was wrong.

In the rest of this article I'd like to reply to some points that were made: the name "AJAX", rendering speed, error handling, the "evilness" of eval() and innerHTML and some other remarks.

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