Help with MSHTML

Could some kind soul point me to the basic information
on MSHTML.

What is it? What creates it?

The starting point for this enquiry is a set of web
pages which I have been asked to make suitable for
the wider public. I have found that most of them contain
the string

       <META content="MSHTML 5.50.4134.600" name=GENERATOR>

and I am trying to work out what it means.

This META tag being Englished means that the HTML in the
page was generated by a program or possibly an agent
which goes by the name MSHTML

<URL: http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/wilbur/head/meta.html >

It is exceedingly difficult to find out very much about
this MSHTML as web searches pickup huge numbers of pages
which use this tag, without (of course) being members
of the special case of web pages that describe web
pages. This is true even when searching usenet as the
prevalence of HTML encumbered posts is now so high.

Indeed, I have only found one really helpful public
post, though I dare say that the haystack does contain
more needles.

     Wednesday, August 2, 2000

     The frustration with the O2K format is over the embedding of
     XML chunks (excuse me, "islands") within strange MSHTML
     markup that makes any XML parser choke. (And I don't care if
     Navigator doesn't choke on it--it's not standard HTML because
     it's not W3C HTML, but a proprietary extension of it.) Why
     does Microsoft brag[1] about their use of XML in Office if
     they have erected barriers to the use of this XML by others?
     Because it's such a trendy standard? It comes off as trying
     to take credit for providing the advantages of the trendy
     standard without actually doing so. Of course, this is what
     marketing people are paid to do. 

     --Robert DuCharme on the xml-dev mailing list

Are there any other pointers?

The actual text of these pages does not merit the term
'strange MSHTML markup' and I suspect that the pages
were made in Dreamweaver, as there appeared to be a
Dreamweaver site map.

In which case, I wonder whether the apparent acronym
MSHTML referers not a variant mark-up language, but is
the name of a DLL. I suspect that these pages were
acquired by an e-mail client (or some other internet
device) and mailled to the people who delivered them
to me; in which case the string I quoted is not
pathognomic of FrontPage, Word dddd or similar cheesy
tools.

It is still odd why a program that did not generate
the markup should want to claim that it did in the
<HEAD> element, falsifying the advertised mark-up quirks,
and odd that a mere transport 'operative' should
modify the internals of a document, so I may be
completely wrong.

Grateful for further or better info.

Ben.

Received on Tuesday, 5 February 2002 08:36:14 UTC