News.com reports on uncertainty surrounding Microsoft's Biztalk server, while WebReference.com puts the XML capabilities of Microsoft's Internet Explorer head-to-head with Mozilla and other competitors.

'Retooling' seems to be the key word for the BizTalk server, which has been delivered for beta testing in pieces, with several key components still in development for a hoped-for ship date by the second half of 2000. The article positions Hewlett-Packard's Changengine and Vitria's BusinessWare as Microsoft's main competition in the area. (The article discusses only the BizTalk server, not the BizTalk schema repository.)

Update: PCWeek is a little more impatient. In BizTalk: All Talk?, Jim Kerstetter questions whether BizTalk may in fact have been vaporware intended to shut out competition. Despite a final section titled 'Hardly a Lost Cause', this is a deeply critical article.

In "The Browser War Continued", Michael Claßen sits down with Internet Explorer 5, Mozilla M12, Opera, and Lynx to examine their support for various parts for the XML standards mix, including XML 1.0 itself, CSS1 and CSS2, XSLT, and XLink. It's a very detailed exploration, complete with test code and results.

Some of the issues Claßen discusses have been prominent on the XML-Dev mailing list lately. The 'Alternatives to the W3C' thread rapidly turned into a discussion of XML support in browsers, and seems to have concluded with Tim Bray's insistence that 'if a browser doesn't support XML+DOM, it doesn't support XML.'