Microsoft came under fire Thursday from Web standards advocates over its latest browser.

Microsoft came under fire Thursday from Web standards advocates over its latest browser, which lets Web developers offer their visitors fairly complex applications with the flick of the wrist-- as long as those visitors aren't using Netscape. Microsoft's newly released Internet Explorer 5.5 browser introduces shortcuts for Web developers that make adding page elements, such as calendars, as easy as inserting a tag. On top of that, Microsoft's adherence to basic industry standards for Web technologies as basic as HTML -- often called the Web's lingua franca--has been called into question by standards advocates. Together, the proprietary innovation and the purported faults in standards compliance mean that Web pages created to work for IE--widely considered to be the dominant browser--won't work with browsers from Netscape, Opera Software and other providers. As if to illustrate the predicament, the download page for version 5.5 came up blank for Netscape users Wednesday. Microsoft has since fixed the problem. Microsoft's proprietary shortcuts came under fire from the Web Standards Project (WaSP), an advocacy group that formed to goad software companies to adhere closely to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendations. WaSP project leader Jeffrey Zeldman urged developers to reconsider before adopting such technologies.