And the guy was me, but I’d forgotten all about the post :-)

This thread is long since dead, but just out of courtesy:

@Dmassy: thanks for clearing that up. I wasn’t aware of Chris’s history (he looks so young on that photograph ;-)) and obviously couldn’t be arsed to google him at the time. Cheers.

@”Anonymous”: well, obviously MSFT doens’t “have” to do anything. And don’t they know it! That’s not to say that their attitude isn’t doing a lot of harm. Webdesign is approximately twice as expensive as it needs to be, thanks to MSFT (I’m not even starting on licensing fees for all kinds of additional software like virus scanners for Windows, but let’s stick to the internet for now). So let me turn your argument around: if those 500.000.000 users don’t know or care about standards, MSFT might as well start supporting them, right? No-one cares, so no-one’s miffed but a lot of other people are the happier for it. What’s the reason, I ask you, MSFT could possibly have for knowingly being incompatible with the rest of the world?

Well, at least institutions such as the EU are starting to sue them over this kind of behaviour. Vendor-lockins are a dead end.

Microsoft needs to, first and foremost, finally do things *right* for a change. With “right” meaning “like the rest of the world”. How’s about CSS2? (I won’t even start on 3.) How’s about fixing the gazillion rendering bugs in IE (yes, even in 7)? Fixing bugs in ECMAscript? ACID2-compliance?

Why does MS need to do anything? When you have 500,000,000 users with 95% of them not even knowing how to change their browser and 99% of users not concerned with compatibility(not even knowing what it is)you don’t need to put any time, effort or dollars into changing something that works well for everyone who uses it. IE does work well,’cos Web developers make it work well, ‘cos we have clients breathing down our necks and 99.999% of our clients use IE and 95% of their customers use IE. If it doesn’t work in ALL versions of IE we are soon told about it. No one breathes down MS’s neck, they are their own boss and beyond listening to a few cries of “foul” from Web developers.

I think that we, as Web developers, are kidding ourselves if we think that MS considers our mental welfare when they are building browsers. It’s not like there’s anyone telling them that their browsers must conform to standards. They have never bothered about browser compatibility and standards, so why are they going to start now?

Lots of people here seem surprised about all of the incompatibility issues(and bugs) in IE7. We weren’t really surprised, were we? Of course not!

We will carry on like we have since browsers were first built, designing for the standards-compatible browsers first and then tweaking to allow for all of the IE quirks.

Guys, learn to live with it!(IE that is)

He keeps talking about the “difficulty” of knowing when to implement standards and when to allow for old code to still appear the way it did, in order to prevent the alienation of old sites.

Is it that difficult to program your browser to recognize correct doctype’s and DTD’s, and implement them when they are basically true, and then default to a “quirks” mode when shown otherwise?

Microsoft doesn’t need to do “incredible things”. Microsoft needs to, first and foremost, finally do things *right* for a change. With “right” meaning “like the rest of the world”. How’s about CSS2? (I won’t even start on 3.) How’s about fixing the gazillion rendering bugs in IE (yes, even in 7)? Fixing bugs in ECMAscript? ACID2-compliance?

I mean, come on. Just build a browser that conforms.

I’m not saying MS has never invented anything good. Inline frames – though I personally advise against them – were a good idea in principle and offered solutions in the pre-AJAX era. Even AJAX itself is basically an MS invention, and a good one. Conditional comments are a godsend and I’d love to see all browsers recognising them to be able to fix their specific quirks without resorting to hacking.

But please. Please. Please. Just for once follow the W3C recommendations when building a rendering engine…

PS is mr. Wilson an ex-Mosaic or ex-Netscape employee? Otherwise I fail to see how he can have been building browsers since as long as there have /been/ browsers…