Tasman (layout engine) - Definition and Overview

Tasman is the name of the layout engine introduced with version 5 of Internet Explorer for Mac. Tasman was an attempt to improve support for web standards, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium. At the time of its release, Tasman was seen as the layout engine with the best support for web standards such as HTML and CSS.

Tantek Çelik led the team that developed the Tasman engine as the Software Development Lead.

An upgraded version of Tasman (version 0.9) was used as the layout engine for the subscription-only MSN for Mac OS X browser. In a posting to the Mac Internet Explorer Talk list, Internet Explorer for Mac project manager Jimmy Grewal listed a number of improvements:

• Full Unicode support.
• Improved CSS support, with CSS 3 Selectors, CSS TV Profile and @media
• Improved DOM support with DOM 1 Core and DOM 2 Core, Style, and Events. Also improved compatibility with Windows IE DOM.
• XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 support, although it is not activated in MSN for Mac OS X.
• Better support for Mac OS X features such as CoreGraphics, ATSUI and CFSocket networking.

External links

• Microsoft Unveils Faster, Simpler and More Reliable Internet Explorer 5 Macintosh Edition (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2000/Jan00/MacWorldIE5.asp)
• Web Standards Project praises Microsoft decision to focus on standards in Mac Internet Explorer 5.0 (http://archive.webstandards.org/macie5.txt)