Naturally they want to develop a better product,
Oh really? That's a laugh. All Microsoft is interested in is sticking a very
large hose directly into your wallet to suck as much cash out as possible.
This is the 8000-pound gorilla who believes in web standards as long as
those standards are theirs. In fact, that's the corporate philosophy across
the board and now they're heading into your living room! Can't wait to see
what havoc they reek there.
As the other posts have said, they've had ample opportunity and time to get
things right, where are we now? Hacks and java scripts...
Well, I did not say that naturally they will adopt W3C standards, but that naturally they want to develop a better product. Yes, "better" as defined by them. However, "better" as they define it is capable of maintaining greater than 70% market penetration, and they are losing market penetration because:
1. IE's ActiveX and Javascript holes allow for spyware and other malware, and people know it, and people are more savvy about it now.
2. The hearts and minds of developers are lost, and (over time) with that goes all the benefits of declaring the de-facto standard: if developers develop to other browsers first, and then adapt it to work in IE (becoming more of the case each month), then sites will work better in other browsers. To win back the hearts and minds of developers, they need to adopt standards.
They will also extend standards in a way that breaks future compatibility with standards so that they can get stuff developed now that is wiz-bang, and tomorrow developers and users will have to choose again whether those IE extensions are good or bad.
So, I think it's a given that the answer to the question "Will you adhere to all recommended W3C standards for XHTML and CSS?" will be "Yes." If you know the answer to the question, there is no point in asking except to vent your frustration.
I wanted to ask a question I did not know the answer to: Will you make sure not to break existing sites that are coded in a messed up way, but a way that you are responsible for requiring?
I don't know the answer. If they say "no," then I will change my coding habits to easily banish IE7 from my CSS hacks and add IE7-specific hacks without changing every page on my site. If they say "yes," then I will continue to code as if IE7 will render it like Firefox, or will recognize the hacks for IE6.
And maybe they never thought of that and they answer "yes," in which case the question just saved you a bunch of work, no?
--
Ben Curtis
WebSciences International
http://www.websciences.org/
v: (310) 478-6648
f: (310) 235-2067
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