Firefox is becoming popular in part because IE is so insecure. I’ve even seen articles in business magazines recommending corporate types switch to FF to avoid viruses and other nasty things.

There are some 49 million Americans, as of the 2000 census, who have a disability of some type. Not all of them will be capable of or want to use the Web, but those that do have money that’s as green as anybody else’s. Making a Web site accessible could gain a company new prospects.

There are brownie points to be earned by having an accessible Web site, just as there are in any “socially responsible business” initiative.

Coding standards-based markup doesn’t prevent IE from rendering nicely, nor does it preclude moderate amounts of eye candy. All you need to have a universally usable/accessible/credible site design is standards-compliant html templates and 2 stylesheets, one for IE, one for everything else.

Writing clean code enhances the likelihood that your pages will acheive good rankings in search engines.

C’mon, everybody, let’s go educate the Corporate Suits on this.

MS don’t make any money out of IE, so it doesn’t affect the bottom line how many people use IE, nor does it affect the competition - Safari and Mozilla are both free.

Reputation: As long as MS sells other products that will only reliably work with IE, and as long as developers prefer nasty hacks to published standards (rounded corners, drop shadows etc) then IE’s reputation is not going to drop that much further than it already has.

Legally, I don’t see an issue: it is the web-site that must be accessible, not the browser rendering, so that argument doesn’t wash either.

Can someone prove me wrong, please? There has to be a good reason why MS should improve IE

When the only sites you visit are Sitepoint, A List Apart and others dedicated to advance web design/development, it might not seem that obvious, but if you surf the “mainstream” websites (those visited by 99% of the internet users…), there are loads of tables and atrocities to witness…

That’s essentially what I was saying. The line after the one you quoted was stating that it’s often difficult to convince non-developers and in most cases it’s not the developers who make the decision when it’s time for a redesign.

I’ve actually been posting in my own blog about the slow adoption of standards and some points you can make to non-developers to help move things forward.

I’ve never understood why some developers consider using tables to be non-standard. They are part of the HTML standard, doesn’t that therefore make them just one of many options that are valid to use?

Using [font size=5 color=blue][b] is as technically valid as [h1], but one is a way of making text big, bold and blue and the other is a way of making text into a heading.

Defining [p class=indent] and using [blockquote] are both technically valid, but they have different semantic meanings.

The same is true of tables and divs. If you have tabular information, write a table. If you a document divided into sections (or divisions) - such as header, menu, content and footer - mark them as divs.

Tables themselves are not non-standard, you are correct; but using them for layout purposes is. Quoting from the HTML 4.01 standard:

Tables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content as this may present problems when rendering to non-visual media. Additionally, when used with graphics, these tables may force users to scroll horizontally to view a table designed on a system with a larger display. To minimize these problems, authors should use style sheets to control layout rather than tables.

It’s easy for developers to see the advantage of standards…

I think it’s easy for *some* developers, but it seems that most of them still don’t care about web standards, use tables for positionning, etc… When the only sites you visit are Sitepoint, A List Apart and others dedicated to advance web design/development, it might not seem that obvious, but if you surf the “mainstream” websites (those visited by 99% of the internet users…), there are loads of tables and atrocities to witness…

It’s easy for developers to see the advantage of standards, but it’s much harder to convince non-developers or people who have only marginal experience with the web. It’s very hard to convince people to change, when they don’t think anything is broken. Most of the benefits of standards compliance don’t have a direct monetary return, so as far as most business owners/shareholders are concerned it’s a waste of time.

That is something.

Just real quick like, why is it so necessary for Microsoft to have Internet Explorer?

What business would they possibly lose if they did not have Internet Explorer?