The question must seem absurd. After all, Microsoft is a member of the W3C and an active participant in the development of web standards. Each new Microsoft product announcement seems to include more standards compliant buzzwords than the last. True, Microsoft doesn’t always deliver complete standards compliance, but nobody’s perfect. At least they’re trying. Or are they?
While Microsoft may pay lip service to web standards, a look at their product line suggests they have no interest in supporting the standards they’ve helped create. Face it, xHTML and CSS just aren’t as sexy as .Net and web services. Microsoft clearly has other priorities and a closer investigation of the facts seems to indicate that support for web standards is hardly a blip on their corporate radar.
Allow me to elaborate with a few examples:
Microsoft.com: Any discussion about Microsoft’s support for web standards should begin with their corporate website. If Microsoft cared about web standards, you would expect them to use those standards on their own website. You’d probably even expect their home page to validate (or at least come close). Instead, Microsoft can’t even be bothered to declare a doctype.
I realize valid HTML is a controversial topic. We all know how hard it is to keep a site valid. One day your site validates, the next day some stray entity or attribute throws your site out of compliance. My point is that those of us who are serious about web standards make an effort. Microsoft’s failure to declare a doctype on their home page indicates they’ve made no effort.
Dig deeper into the source code of Microsoft.com and you’ll find one coding atrocity after another (font tags, nested tables, and embedded images that simulate a styled list, etc.). It’s as if the developers of Microsoft.com have no clue what CSS is, let alone how to use it. To Microsoft’s credit, they seem to be using their own tools to create and maintain their website. My problem with those tools is that they encourage the worst sort of design habits. They certainly don’t encourage the use of web standards. Which leads me to . . .
FrontPage: Web professionals don’t take FrontPage seriously — it’s a fact. The problem is that much of the rest of the world views FrontPage as the most cost effective way to manage a website. Managers love it because “it’s so easy anyone can use it”. Organizations buy the marketing hype without the slightest concern for the code FrontPage is generating (“It’s Microsoft, it must be compatible”). Since the product ships with some versions of Microsoft Office, FrontPage has more or less become the de facto standard for managing departmental websites. Unfortunately, most organizations don’t realize what they’ve gotten themselves into until they try to migrate their legacy FrontPage website to a shiny new content management system. There’s simply no good way to automate this sort of conversion. Suddenly FrontPage doesn’t seem like such a bargain.
Microsoft’s marketing machine boasts about FrontPage 2003’s powerful code editing mode, professional design tools, and database integration. Sounds great. How about a tool that creates valid xHTML and encourages novice content authors to format their pages using CSS and semantic markup instead of font tags? As it is, FrontPage seems to invite novice web authors to do the wrong thing at every possible opportunity. FrontPage has enabled so many departmental webmasters to create so much bad HTML that I fear we’ll never fully recover from the damage that’s been done. Microsoft is directly responsible for this.
Visual Studio: As one developer on Microsoft’s Channel 9 blog recently noted about Visual Studio, “creating xHTML compliant websites is a pain in the ASP.net”. In the know Microsoft developers speak in hushed tones about ‘Whidbey’, the next generation .Net development tool that will reportedly support xHTML and CSS (no, these same insiders don’t seem to think it’s strange that the current set of tools don’t already support web standards). In the meantime, the current generation of Microsoft’s professional development tools seem to be no better than their consumer tools are at supporting web standards. .Net developers seem perfectly happy with a tool that might render an unordered list as a table (Microsoft in general seems to have some strange aversion to unordered lists).
To be fair, it seems that Microsoft is attempting to address these inadequacies, but one suspects that unless the new tools are absolutely foolproof, it’ll be mighty difficult to train developers to change their way of thinking. After all, Microsoft’s website doesn’t validate — so why should mine? Then there’s all that legacy code to think about. It’s extremely unlikely that the new Studio product will provide much assistance in migrating bloated and invalid code from previous versions.
Microsoft Word: I’ve written at length on a couple of occasions about Microsoft Word’s inability to easily export documents to clean xHTML. If you’re using a content management system with a built-in WYSIWYG editor, it’s likely that a simple cut-and-paste from Word into your article editing page will produce undesirable results when that content is published within a standards compliant website. One has to wonder if it’s really all that difficult to generate clean xHTML from MS Word. Just once I’d like to see Clippy tapping on my monitor asking me if I want clean xHTML. Something tells me this won’t happen in my lifetime.
Internet Explorer. Standards compliant web developers are well aware of the myriad of hacks required to effectively use web standards in the most popular web browser on the planet. It’s as if Microsoft takes pleasure in making the simplest tasks near impossible. Search Google for Interent Explorer CSS Hacks and you’ll find tens of thousands of pages devoted to working around Microsoft’s browser. It’s been noted that these same hacks will likely come back to haunt us all at some point in the future. It seems quite apparent that IE‘s CSS quirks are greatly responsible for many web developers’ failure to embrace xHTML and CSS as the standard method for developing websites. IE’s poor support for standards has given a generation of web designers the impression that the standards are broken.
If Opera and Mozilla are capable of supporting web standards, why can’t Microsoft? In fact, it seems like small, independent software developers and the Open Source movement are leading the way, while Microsoft is barely keeping pace, despite its presence in the organization responsible for developing these standards. The best CSS editors on the market are TopStyle from Bradbury Software and Style Master from WestCiv. How is it that independents with limited resources are producing better standards based tools than the richest corporation on the planet? Could it be that Microsoft views web standards as a threat? After all, web standards imply a cross-platform, cross-application document format. One of the prime strategies Microsoft used to achieve their dominant market position is the proprietary file format. Web standards are clearly a threat to proprietary file formats.
It’s hard to say exactly what Microsoft’s problem might be. What are we to believe? Either Microsoft is hopelessly behind in their support of web standards, or they’re subverting standards to protect their market share. Or maybe Bill Gate secretly loves table-based layouts (he does seem to fit the profile). Some insiders have suggested that the company has been so obsessed with security issues for the past couple of years that they’ve lost touch with everything else. To me, that seems like the most unlikely scenario.
Regardless of what Microsoft’s excuse may be, the fact is that the current incarnation of their product line lacks any meaningful support for web standards, something that they will have to face head on as they move forward with their recently publicized accessibility initiative. They can’t achieve their goals without addressing the problems they’ve created — and the tools they’ll be using will not help. Considering Microsoft’s dominance in the marketplace, it’s remarkable that the standards movement has made as much progress as it has in the past couple of years.
Nice Article!!!
This is probably the most complete article I’ve ever read on how Microsoft disregards webstandards. “I hate IE” articles are a dime-a-dozen these days, and it’s refreshing to take a look at an article that looks at the whole picture – not just Internet Explorer.
Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that Microsoft disregards web standards on multiple fronts – not just regarding browsers. Your point about propriety file formats was particularly interesting.
In all, great job!
ITYM “WYSIWYG”.
I think this article does not take into account why microsoft does the things it does. Web standards are not important to microsoft because customers are not asking for enough. Until there is the demand, microsoft will have no reason to really support web standards. The best thing to do then is keep up advocating web standards and try and get clients involved in the message. It would be a powerful message if companies like adobe and dell sent microsoft emails saying that they need to get their browser up to speed. This was a good article and it is definitly something web designers/developers need to think about. If microsoft doesn’t get on the ball with web standards, it essentially can make the hard work people have put into using and learning standards based design, practically useless. Just my two cents.
“…it’s remarkable that the standards movement has made as much progress….”
“Web standards are not important to microsoft because customers are not asking for enough.”
Since MicroSoft’s customers aren’t Web profesionals, it makes a certian degree of sence why MS is moving so slowly and yet, standards are still able to progress: you’re dealing with two different groups. If you were to poll Web pros you’ll probibly find that most either don’t use IE for surfing, or use it only because 90%+ use it.
Most people either don’t know enough about standards, or don’t care. As an example, I’ve seen many requests for Flash intros even though MacroMedia themselves have said it isn’t a good idea.
There is another thing: every day, millions and millions of US Dollars, Euros, Yens… go down the drain for Web Designers, Internet Agencies, Dot.coms and anyone who professionally produces Internet Sites and Content. This loss of money has one main reason: working around the flaws in Microsoft Internet Explorer (all versions).
Microsoft loves to declare that it cares about its customers. Well, from all these named above, many many many have bought either a Microsoft operating system or other software. So: Web Designers of any kind are in most cases MS customers, too. So: WHY BUT WHY has nobody ever come up the idea to collect signatures, or to form a lobby, anything to impose customer pressure upon MS to FINALLY invest some money (which they’ve got plenty) to vamp up its MSIE.
My own customers do not care what my personal strategies are – as long as they are happy with me any my work. If they are not, they will look for some other ad agency and spend their money there. So, since it might not be always easy to ignore MS (as long as most consumer PCs are shipped with MSIE), why not use OUR potential as MS customers and take actions against MS behaviour and politics.
And I wonder why no financial analyst or financial journalist has dared speaking out this problem in public. Let’s face it again: due to MS incapability or politics, web designers around the world are loosing A LOT OF MONEY. So let’s do something about it for a change!
Nice article. I don’t want to be pedantic, but firstly XHTML is an acronym and all uppers. Writing it as “xHTML” devalues your article somewhat. Secondly, you should check out Chris Pratley’s recent post on Word, which will clear up some of the Word/XHTML misconceptions.
Been searching desperately around the Net to find a reason the website I just designed for my company doesn’t display right in MSN Explorer. I have been away from creating web pages for 2 years but I wasn’t exactly shocked by this article.
Micro$oft has consistantly snubbed technology in favour of forcing users to use thier product instead of fairly competeing with other software. You know, if Safari and Opera can compete on the same standards then what’s M$s problem? Oh yea… they haven’t changed. Still monopolistic overlords of the Net.
A simple answer to your simple question: “No, they do not! and why should they..” Meanwhile, I think it’s time to take back the web. Advocacy is one thing, a valuable one, but to me it doesn’t make very much sense to take care of our little IE. Surely the medal isn’t single-sided, one thing should be more pronounced than in the past: “If that browser doesn’t support that particular feature I’m using (and I tried hard to make it cross-browser), then: Go and don’t come back!”
I mean what was everybody thinking about accessibility back in ’98, ’99, 2k, ..? “Hm, curious Netscape 4’s implementation of layers suck. I’ll develop a version for IE 4 and that’ll be fine.”
I think accessibility is a valuable good, but if develop website that are fully standards-compliant (And validate!) and a browser isn’t able to render your work properly, don’t care about it.
It should be possible to show your users what advantages they could gain, if they’d use a standards-compliant program.
I think the point of Microsoft might be that the value of the standards is not as great as the value of the legacy code that is developed. The mindset of programmers I know is that their code works in IE/MS. They can do what they want with the tools they have, and they don’t mind saying that IE is a requirement because most everybody has it. ROI for making stuff work cross browser is minimal, especially when 99.9% of (our) website traffic is IE 5.0-IE6.0
Let me be pedantic on this one:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fkirkb1.sg-host.com%2Farchives%2F2004%2F04%2F29%2F33%2F
results in: This page is not Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!
Line 46, column 549: value of attribute “id” must be a single token
… id=”Style Master CSS Editor” …
id=”StyleMasterCSSEditor”
Bye, Olaf.
I like css as much as the next guy. But i’ve had it up to here with all this deprecated tag talk.
Font tags are the lowest common denominator, and for most of us, who aren’t designing a arts/fartsy design site, we have to stick to standard html.
With nested tables, font tags. Because these are pretty much guaranteed to work on all browsers the same way.
Now once all browsers support all css, and there is a standard css, of course i would love to take advantage of it.
But we’re not there yet, and until every single person on planet earth is running a totally css compliant browser, that may never be so. So then guys like me who have to create reasonably easy to use easy to view, with consistency will have to stick to standard html.
Face it, css has become like a political thing. Just like being a text editing coder vs a wysiwyg coder.
The key to being a great coder is knowing when and where to use a particular technology.
CSS is the future, i know it, but we’re not there yet. So for me, i’ll use a little css here and there, to add to or accentuate a page. Especially if it’s an intranet, where i know everyone can support css.
I’d love to not have to type a billion font tags. We all would love save all that typing time.
But let’s take this from a common sense approach.
Microsoft is not perfect, but then no one is.
I personally hate their website and their search functions, but in terms of design, they stick to the lowest common denomonator.
BECAUSE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS TO MAKE SURE VISITORS CAN USE OR SEE THE SIGHT.
I apologize if i come across so strong, but i am tired of this political drive that css is in, and html font tags are out.
Craig, you miss the point. CSS is standard. If you’re talking about just fonts, why not use CSS? Even I.E. knows how to interpret css that says
font-family: .... That’s not the point.The point is that Microsoft isn’t developing software (frontpage, word, etc..) that output code that is clean and css-based. Kirk already stated in the article that microsoft is giving lip service to webstandards, after all, it is part of the W3C.
And the most important thing is that visitors can use and see the site. With nested tables, spacer gifs, and font tags, many visitors CAN’T see the site. A blind user, trying to navigate through an unstandard website would be presented with a barrage of code that is completely irrelevant to what he/she is trying to read. CSS-based design loads faster, making webpages more usable to people with slow connections.
And for those in older browsers (netscape 4), CSS can be completely ignored, just delivering the whole point of a website: the content.
Yes, absolutely, the most important thing is making sure that visitors can use and see a website. Designing to accessibility and coding standards ensures that all visitors can access the content of a website. Using outdated code, does not.
awesome article .. well done !!!
Unfortunately IE has got itself into a very good position, it supports enough of the standards to work with the standards compliant websites pretty well (hacks for bugs aside) AND it has the best rendering engine for non-standards compliant, non-complete, mis-mashed and downright awful code.
You try using any other browser for everyday web-surfing (outside of web design sites) and you’ll see a variety of rendering “problems” that IE does a great job of figuring out or ignoring.
Now this is fine for your average web-developer, they usually know what the problem is and how to get around it if they really need to, or at least that it will work in one of X number of browsers they have installed.
However give your average end user one of these browsers instead of IE and after a few weeks (or even days) I’m sure they’ll be asking for IE back.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying that standards compliance shouldn’t be a goal for all web developers and all browser developers. However I don’t think that users will be happy to upgrade to these other browsers, at the moment, and if the users don’t want to change their software choice then theres nothing forcing Microsoft to take the issue to heart.
from comment #8: “So let’s do something about it for a change!”
I agree wholeheartedly. I have included a warning to all visitors of my site (http://wellheard.com) who are using IE and explain the benefits of switching. I suggest everyone do the same and educate the average user.
They care less about standards and all about locking in customers…
Do you people know who invented CSS?
Yessir indeed, Hakon Lie, yup one and the same that made IE5 for MAC…
MS even has a devensive (for how long?) patent on that…
No, like a bully they will never want to play by the rule, they want to make up the rules as they go, seeking the most opertune moment…
Bullies only listen to pain, the only way to get rid of a bully is being a bigger bully…
Yes this means locking out IE users from beautifull stuff, I have a dull standard style for my forums for my IE members and I also explained that I value them a lot, and asked if they would value my time by downloading
FirebirdFirefox to get the fancy style instead of me wasting my time porting to IE.oops, mistake hakon Lie made Opera not IE5 MAC, that was Tantec Çelik of course… They did work together on the CSS 2 working group at W3C…
Do you care about accessibility and usability ? If yes, why does you syle sheet contain “body {font-size: 0.7em;}” ? It makes the article almost unreadable if you have configured your browser to a 10px font by default!
Laurent, you’re part of a minority who has configured the font-size to a small size. To the majority of people, the font is readable. Moreover, since Kirk and Kassia do care about accessibility, the font size is reasizable (even in IE).
Isn’t accessibility all about minorities being able to access contents as easily as the majority ?
Leaving the default size doesn’t make the pages less readable to the majority who didn’t configure the font size of their browser.
Of course it’s resizable, and I was able to do that, but wouldn’t it be even better to use the user’s default configuration ? This way, everybody can choose once for all the size that better fits their eyes and not have to bother changing it for every site they visit.
I suspect this is all because of those browsers with an insanely big default font size. And since absolute size is evil, everybody chooses to make life harder for that minority I belong to instead of taking the risk that the majority may think “Oh my god! This site uses insanely big fonts! The web designer must be blind or stupid!”. But the fact is the site would just be using their default font.
And what about the minority of visually impaired who also configured the font size of their browser, but to a bigger size ? Doesn’t this your setting make life harder for them by showing them a smaller font than what they prefer to be able to read comfortably?
Laurent – your points are well taken. This is one of the dilemmas that web designers face when they choose to address the issue of accessibility. As you’ve noted, the default font size on most browsers is “insanely big” for the average, non-visually impaired user.
One of the biggest challenges we face in getting designers and webmasters to consider accessibility is the current prevailing notion that accessible websites are somehow less visually appealing than non-accessible websites. An uneducated designer will frequently claim that their creativity cannot be hampered by “accessibility restrictions”. What should we to tell these designers? That accessible web design won’t allow them to set a font size? That would only reinforce their notion that accessibility somehow limits their creativity. As a result, they’ll continue setting their fonts in pixels.
Absolute size keywords may provide a way out, but in our experience browser support for those keywords is still somewhat uneven. Currently it seems like the best approach is the relative unit ’em’ that we’ve used on this site. And yes, we’ve set the body of the articles smaller than 1 em because most browsers do have ‘insanely big’ default fonts. As Francey pointed out, the important thing is that users can resize fonts easily.
Other Browsers such as Firefox does not support all Standards too. We are waiting for over 2 years now, that mozilla implements contenteditable in its browser. I know, that this is not a standard of w3c but there is a w3c standard there, wich could make sites editable. Not even this standard is running bugfree within mozilla. Other browsers, such as opera doesnt even care about this. Thatswhy is IE actually the best sollution for making wysiwyg editing solutions for contentmanagement systems. Their engine and jscript allows to edit regions in a noneditable site.
Another thing is: if you look at msdn developer libraries, you ll see that the libs are changed. There are a couple of new articles and tutorials how to use IEs editing capabilities with a nice sourcecode which is DOM compliant.
On the other side, microsoft seems to be added this features since IE 5.5. I dont understand why microsoft have waited so long to update his libraries to show these capabilities.
I think, that microsoft knows very well what they do and that microsoft develope Software, wich is standards compliant for the future but dont give it out in this time. I think these are strategic decissions we cannot understand at this time.
Esim – there are now a few editable controls that will work with Mozilla browsers. The implementation of most of these controls is problematic because of the code they create and the way most content authors are inclined to use them. Have you ever cut-and-paste from MS Word into an IE editable HTML control? Try it sometime and take a look at the code. If there’s even a moderate amount of formatting the resulting code will likely be a mess.
So far the best I’ve seen is XStandard (www.xstandard.com). You can probably guess, it currently only works with IE.
Yes Kirk,
you ve right. The main Problem is the content author. They are not allways Webworkers, so that they sometimes even dont know about standards and think if the system works the code must be allright too. I am working on a xhtml wysiwyg editor with IE at this time and i spend lots of time to cleanup the code it is giving out. If mozilla would have same capabilities as IE, i would develop it on Moz caused by its much more cleaner Code. A very good Project at Mozilla is mozile.mozdev.org for example. Its open source too. XStandard i know too, its a very nice System.
On the known Word pasting Problem could be a solution i am workin on it. There are a couple of Methods on MS Jscript, that can make a sollution possible. Such as clipBoardData, onPaste, onBeforePaste and so on. But its difficult. This Article on this page is explaining the situation very well but we should not forget, that a big company as Microsoft is like every big Institution. The good things wich could happen, dont happen allways caused by burocracy. I am sure that there are many guys there, wishing as we do, trying to implement W3C standards. Lets hope they win 🙂
Re: body {font-size: 0.7em;}
“To the majority of people, the font is readable.”
Where did this bogus statistic come from?
0.7em uses 49% of the pixels per character of my (or anyone else’s) default. Like ‘font-size: 11px’, there’s no way that’s readable for me.
It doesn’t matter what default size browsers ship with. The default is there for users to decide to change, if they find it necessary. It should be exclusively up to them to decide what is an appropriate default. Any body font-size rule other than 100%, 1em or medium is an inexcusable imposition and disrespect for any and all who have set the size that best suits them, and to all who have no need to change due to a perfectly acceptable (to them) shipped default.
This is not to say authors should never apply font-size rules. It only means that the bulk of the content visitors are there for in the first place should be rendered at the size they have selected, not the size some page designer imposes as somehow better. Sizing rules should be limited to things like customizing highlights and supplemental info, like headings, titles, copyright notices and the like.
Microsoft.com’s lack of a doctype isn’t a damning lack of standards, it’s just a corporate standard of web design. Look at Google, it has no doctype and would fail if it were HTML 4.01. Esim, the w3c standard of editable controls has very little pertinence – it’s just one of the gazillions of recommendations that the w3c makes – and many of these are too crazy to be adopted by either moz or ie. So I’d rather have Firefox to be standards-compliant than to have IE with tens of CSS bugs. For those that think Moz is behind, check out Firefox, it’s quite a polished and exceptional product.
> BECAUSE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS TO MAKE SURE VISITORS CAN USE OR SEE THE SIGHT.
Isn’t that what CSS is all about? Even if the user doesn’t have any CSS support (if they’re using Links or a 3- version), they can still use the site. Whereas, on table-based layout, some users are often stuck – text-based browsers and screenreaders can’t interpret them.
The interesting thing about Word is that it produces well formed HTML. This makes it reasonably easy to write a parser that strips out a lot of the MS nonsense and outputs nice clean HTML. The output can be easily transliterated into compliant HTML or XHTML. For some complex documents we have at work the result actually displays better under IE than the raw Word output.
Steve – I’m aware that there are a variety of parsing and tranformation tools that are capable of converting Word’s output to minimal XHTML. My point is that the vast majority of users won’t bother to transform their Word generated HTML in that manner. The typical administrative assistant has no clue where to begin. Clearly this should be a feature Word offers out of the box.
Oh yes … no argument there. It just occurs to me that they went to the trouble of making their HTML well formed which isn’t required. I just wonder what their priorities were?
I actually work in Configuration Management. Two plus decades ago we were looking at HTML for online procedure storage and planning to use a visual editor like Word to create and manipulate the documents. Unfortuntely it never happened. And HTML itself went off into presentation land.
However we somtimes *need* to import word documents into the CM system and it is nice that MS did (possibly by accident?) provide well formed HTML.
The W3C is looking old and tired (and not just its website). To me the only thing it has acheived is to open the floodgates for new browsers to be developed which can claim to be ‘standards compliant,’ although they have bespoke rendering engines and inevitable differences. 90% of my site visitors use Internet Explorer. The advent of Mozilla, Opera and the like simply make my role as a web developer harder as I have to deal with each browser’s quirks. I would love to see Microsoft set the defacto standards for the web. I’m fed up with ankle-biting upstart, bleeding-heart, open-source fanatics claiming their standards are better than those set by the market leader of the computer software industry.
MS has acheived the incredible – they opened the desktop market to the masses. As a web developer you owe them a lot. They have brought your visitors.. and your customers. Without Windows (and it’s billions of dollars worth of UI research), PC’s would still be the domain of the geek. Microsoft (like many large corporates) have been ruthless, but this is just the reality of real-world business.
Granted, IE hasn’t been re-released in a long time but as a mark of it’s stature, it’s still the leader of the pack. With the addition of the excellent Google toolbar it sports a pop-up blocker, form auto-filler and best of all – ingenius integration with the Google search engine. Google have not bothered creating various different versions of the toolbar for the rest of the browser rabble, and good on them!
There are those who hold up “tabbed browsing” as the be-all-and-end-all of the browser experience. Well, you might like to experiment with docking the start-bar to the side of your screen (you can then see all the titles of your open IE windows). Since IE is well cached by Windows, new browser instances open in a jiffy. You can even have several browsers open on one desktop in any layout. Opera/Mozilla’s tabbed browsing doesn’t add much more than that. And yes, the “gestures” plugin for Mozilla is cool but at the end of the day it’s just a gimmick. Most Microsoft mice feature additional buttons which work much more elegantly.
At the dawn of personal computing there were rival platforms, and it took a while to establish the defacto standard (the x86 architecture). It was only then that PC’s started appearing in the consumer market. I don’t believe any buerocratic bodies were required to supervise this progression. It happened because of cold, hard business competition. Although many rival platforms fell by the wayside in the process, the end result was a huge positive step for computer science in general. Intel created the x86 and once the standard was set, the doors were opened for healthy competition from the x86 clone market. Imagine the design headaches that would be resolved if we had one standard for HTML/CSS/Javascript. Microsoft present a very strong proposition. At the end of the day, W3C is just a glorified discussion board. Why should MS feel they have any responsibility to this organisation?
With IE, Microsoft have created (and assimilated) a well-thought-out and very powerful javascript DOM that, for example, supports element iteration much more flexibly than the W3C model. They have also created a rich set of CSS filter pseudo-classes which are light years ahead of CSS2. And we’re talking about a model that MS designed several years ago. If CSS3 ever gets decided on by whichever buerocratic committee, it will be taking its lead from Microsoft’s innovation.
When the next iteration of IE is released I’m hoping it will include support for PNGs with an alpha channel. This is the only feature of any importance that the rival browsers are starting to pick up. Once this is in the bag IE has won.
Goodbye, W3C. Hello, standards!
“Once this is in the bag IE has won”
So you don’t think Microsoft has already won? I’m certain they declared victory quite a few years ago. Hence the lack of innovation ever since.
And what would you say to Mac users who have essentially been abandoned by Microsoft? Or those users who value their security and have followed CERT’s advice and switched browsers?
According to this report Internet Explorer is actually losing ground. It’s not much, granted, but it is an indication that users are starting to take notice of IE’s shortcomings and are willing to consider other alternatives.
It’s unfortunate that your role as web developer has been disrupted by IE’s failure to achieve total world domination. Something tells me you’ve got a long road ahead.
I think the pendulum will swing right back when users install Mozilla and find that it crashes more than IE (like I have found to my delight) 🙂
I think users may also start to return to IE when they get a bizarre rendering of websites that have not been designed around Mozilla’s / Opera’s / Konqueror’s quirks.
I think when IE7 is released it will crush the opposition in a Borg-like fashion. I am sad for the hard work of the Mozilla project being in vain. Ultimately, however, I believe computer science is better off for having a software leader like this. Once the defacto standard is set there will be a common ground to work on, and clones may compete (like I was saying with x86).
The W3C has been too slow in deciding the latest web standards eg CSS3. The buerocracy has slowed down to a stand-still, probably because of all the self-proclaimed web gurus jumping on board and constantly discussing but not producing any decisions. Microsoft is one, organised, (arguably fascist) organisation. I believe it takes such an entity to create products with innovation. a discussion board (like W3C) is simply not a place where innovative ideas get realised
Chris – you have an interesting world view. Maybe you could elaborate more on the “quirks” of Mozilla/Opera/Konq.
Also, how do you explain Microsoft’s participation in the W3C? If they’re doing so much better on their own maybe they should withdraw from the W3C. Sitting on the committee and then disregarding the standards they’ve helped create raises some interesting questions. What is their motiviation?
BTW, IE7 has already been released. You can get it here.
Kirk, regarding quirks in Mozilla, you’ll find a list of known bugs at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ The ones I’ve found personally are involve borders failing to render correctly when separate CSS definitions are made eg when you define border-color, border-width and border-style in separate definitions for the same element – they fail to combine correctly. Also I’ve found that nesting divs causes the renderer to fail on the background div, leaving it “patchily” and intermittently displayed. Also, corruption of underlines occurs in linked text that has :hover behaviour. See http://www.chrisbeach.co.uk/viewShouts.php
Also I don’t approve of the proprietary CSS that Mozilla has invented, like the “MozOpacity” property – More on that at http://www.chrisbeach.co.uk/core/scripts/entryViewer.php?ID=4753
In terms of propriety CSS, IE has invented so much more, for example, all of the alpha filters, as well as the scrollbar colour properties.
It’s true, IE has made major improvements over vanilla CSS1/2. In particular it has developed an HTC model that ties javascript “behaviours” to HTML elements via a CSS property. Imagine being able to change not just the look of your whole site, but also the behaviour, via one .css file. You can with IE.
I prefer the way IE has implemented it’s proprietary syntax. It does not pollute the w3c namespaces. Furthermore, I would say that Mozilla’s “MozOpacity” property (for example) is the wrong way to go about extending the w3c spec. I don’t think browsers should have their own namespaces – it’s not in the spirit of the web.
In response to the last poster, I would say that Microsoft is a member of W3C, at least for now. Here’s a news post from back in 2003 that may shed some light on the subject : http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8495
Perhaps what we are seeing, is a manifestation of the issue of patent rights. Microsoft is no stranger to sparring with the W3C on patent issues, such as, for example, a similiar situation that arose in early 1999, and pertaining to CSS and . In an article written by Paul Festa at CNET on 2-8-1999, he quotes Microsoft’s Thomas Reardon as stating the following:
“To ensure that the technology that we have submitted will be free from the cloud of potential patent questions…we have typically committed to freely sharing our patent rights, for use in implementing a standard that results from our submission, with other W3C members who are willing to do the same…
“Microsoft agrees that, upon adoption of this contribution as a W3C recommendation, any W3C member will be able to obtain a license from Microsoft to implement and use the technology described in this contribution for the purposes of supporting the W3C recommendation on a royalty-free basis. One condition of this license shall be the party’s agreement to not assert patent rights against Microsoft and other companies for their implementation of the W3C recommendation.
“It would be unreasonable to require a company to develop a technology, submit the technology as a standard, give up its own patent rights in the standard submission, but remain exposed to claims of infringement by other companies, who are themselves free to use the technology and patents of the submitting company,” Reardon wrote.
Now, a very interesting point that the CNET News entry reminds us to remember about 1999, is that Microsoft was a member of the W3C…But so was Netscape, who, on this particular issue, argued the following:
“The original style sheet implementation dates from the mid-70’s,” said Netscape vice president of client products Jim Hamerly. “At least 20 commercial systems have supported style sheets since that time. We view this patent as largely not an issue.”
So, we’re talking about standardizations, on the one hand. But, on the other hand, we’re talking about a conglomeration of corporate entities that are competitive rivals, haplessly mulling around together under the thin umbrella of the W3C, and in the mix of all of this, is the topic of discussion: Namely, technology, patents, and future development, which of course, results ultimately, in future profits, or perhaps the lack thereof.
The reason why there’s so many hacks and bugs for internet explorer is because it’s worth the time for malicious script writers to write stuff that’ll slow down internet explorer (Also why many think firefox is fast when all they have are spywares and stuff attacking internet explorer). If 70% of the population uses Firefox or Netscape, people would be writing bad stuff for firefox and netscape instead of internet explorer and everyone would be saying Internet Explorer is safer and faster.
Hi hi, I need to stress that this post and the resulting comments have nothing to do with Internet Explorer’s security (or lack thereof). We’re discussing Microsoft’s lack of standards support and the hacks required to make a standards based web page display properly in the various legacy versions of IE.
Having said that I think it’s probably time I closed this thread. It’s likely I’ll revisit this issue when IE 7 is released.