In response to Kornel and some of the more cynical posters, I would say "keep your faith". There will always be a Microsoft present in our world, whether they come with the moniker "Microsoft", "Sun" or "Oracle". Fortunately, there're other elements to keep things in balance. Opensource is increasingly becoming a stronger force in keeping Microsoft from changing from a "monopoly" to a "dictatorship". We developers are finally learning that "class-action" and "lawsuits" aren't always dirty words. Technical blogs giving the lowdown on IE's shortcomings have been informative to everyone who reads them but so have Larry Rosen's legal work. I admit that if I was thinking of us enlightened developers trying to save the world from MS, I'd be pretty depressed but once I see the efforts of everybody else from all walks of life contributing, I'm heartened. Might seem OT, but I'd say there's a link. E.g.: poor country with no money for MS products -> Opensource software -> Better compliance with standards (web or otherwise) -> more countries like this -> critical mass big enough for MS to take notice.
I think the points brought up by the rest re: IE shortcomings have been spelt out well enough. Won't add to it but I've been straddling both the Microsoft and anti-MS world long enough and I'm still hopeful until now :) I've used VS.Net and think it's good enough a first try and the fact that it MAY be XHTML 1.1 compliant in the next iteration is pretty darned amazing. (Alright, so I have low expectations). OK, for most part, this mail has been random rambling but the gist of it is that I'm still optimistic about pushing MS towards compliance EVENTUALLY :) -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kornel Lesinski Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 2:59 AM To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: Re: [WSG] Slightly OT... Interview with IE Dev team > Microsoft has been hyping about web-applications more than you'd > imagine, the MSDN Library is full of articles on the subject. 3 of the > included posters in the 2003 edition are about web-applications. They don't think about W3C-standards based applications. They are just using a buzzrword to push .NET apps. > But I'm convinced Microsoft will make IE7 support standards... why? > Because VS 2005 supports the entire XHTML1.1 and CSS2.1 spec They have to support some HTML, XML and CSS anyway, so that's not a problem to add few extra tags. Page you mentioned promotes layout table creator and shows some non-standard code... Microsoft knows that there are web standards. They used W3C to get help on creating technologies they needed, but Microsoft doesn't *gain* anything from supporting other W3C standards. They will support standards when they see cash coming from it, or when someone forces them to do it. How *Microsoft* would benefit from supporting XHTML and CSS2? ... it just doesn't sell. ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
