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Are you saying HTML isn't machine readable? Actually the W3C moved away from XML in browsers years ago because it's a horrible mess. Overly strict and results in lots of parsing and encoding errors because the browser isn't allowed to try to make sense of anything less than perfect XML. Using valid(*) HTML as a templating language seems a good choice to me. Of course it's nothing new, and there's not much justification for calling it OO. The Document Object Model is already OO.

(*) valid if the tag/attribute name extensions are properly declared

Nice, however, none of those things are, in fact, breaking the standard. Breaking interoperability does not break the standard if the standard is being conformed to. The fact that the standard was inadequate to ensure interoperability is what was at fault.

it's true that IE6 had numerous bugs in it's CSS implementation, but at IE6's release, they were the most standard conformant browser out there. By your argument, every browser in existence breaks the standard because none of them fully conform, and many have bugs.

IE6's problem was that it was left to stagnate. This is a far cry from deliberately breaking the standards. Every subsequent release of IE has improvde standards conformant, and to my knowledge, IE8 is still the single, and only browser to reach 99% conform to CSS 2.1 (the lastest ratified CSS standard).

Granted, IE's conformance may be slanted because the vast majority of the W3 CSS test suite was submitted by Microsoft, but no 3rd parties have shown any other browser to be more compliant either.

For example:

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-summary?IE8=on&FX2=on&FX3=on&OP9=on&uas=CUSTOM

Unfortunately, Chrome is not on the list.

So all your weasel wording aside, you have yet to provide any compelling argument that Microsoft has deliberately broken standards, when facts show that at the time MS released any given version of their browser, they have had significantly improved standards conformance over the previous version, and in some cases (such as the current one) have the best conformance to ratified standards.

I think you're full of it. Microsoft is a key committed member of the CSS WG and continue to work in good faith helping the group. Things like test suites, specifications, standards discussions represent some of the output from Microsoft's involvement.

One of the main goals for IE8 was to have full CSS2 compliance and to improve performance over IE7. Compared to previous versions of IE, IE8 largely accomplished these goals. Moving forward for IE9, the goal will be increased standards compliance around CSS3, competative JavaScript performance against competeing browsers, improved rendering performance, and *throwing it some marketing* making it the best browsing experience for ANYONE who uses Windows, dev, designer, consumer, it pro.

Since you're big on the whole standards thing, you might like to know that IE8 is the only fully CSS 2.1 standards compliant browser at the moment. Neither Firefox or Chrome fully implement the entire spec yet.

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support?uas=IE6-IE7-IE8-FX2-FX3-OP9#css

With regard to ECMAScript4, Microsoft had some fundamental differences with whether it was worth expanding the language considering the legacy baggage and the need to add modern scripting features. We haven't derailed anything, we voiced a disagreement, one that was shared by Yahoo at the time. Microsoft and Yahoo didn't agree on much back then either.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2007/11/major-stakeholders-argue-about-the-future-of-web-scripting.ars

It's easy to have a casual knowledge of the issues when it comes to standards discussions, but when it comes down to creating a quality specification, the issues are a lot more complex and there are numerous viewpoints from people a lot smarter than you or I about the matter. Your accusations and assertions about Microsoft don't produce any productive outcomes in the debate, and all you really end up doing is vent anger online.

Does any of this genuinely change your opinion in the slightest, or am I wasting my time?

Why shouldn't you use XHTML?

Many reasons

The main one, however, is because there seem to be an agreement between all browser vendors that the future is HTML5. Nobody cares about XHTML any more.

Popular doesn't mean standard. These are separate concepts. If it did, then every browser except for IE could be considered non-standard. Canvas is only popular within the enthusiast web developer clique, or "circle jerk" if you will.

Yes, what would those narcissistic onanist web developers know about the relevance of the canvas tag to creating... web applications?

Wow, since some snarky webtrash said it, it must be true.

I haven't gotten snarky yet, but perhaps I will when you explain what "webtrash" means. I certainly hope it's not your term for someone who actually has a working understanding of the issues we've been discussing.

I tend to use the test suites when referencing this:

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-css?uas=IE7-IE8-FX3-OP9

That's *awesome*. With IE 8, we can now say that after 8 years of lagging behind, the browser created by the world's richest software company marginally edges out Firefox 3 in a feature-by-feature comparison CSS 2.1 features! Gives you a surge of pride, right? Why, if it constituted the most commonly used version of the product, that'd almost be the same thing as giving the world back all the man-hours spent trying to work around the support that wasn't there until this year!

On a different topic, I'd be interested in your take on the relative importance in day-to-day terms of, say @page:left and reliable absolute positioning.

I don't work off these lists either, but I'm aware of a numer of high profile parts of it, say, the Canvas element. I'm sure Microsoft is too.

A lot of the features discussed for HTML 5 have had visible implementations for 3-4 years. You could call them bleeding edge in 2006, maybe 2007. 2009? Not without looking pretty silly.

Popular doesn't mean standard. These are separate concepts. If it did, then every browser except for IE could be considered non-standard. Canvas is only popular within the enthusiast web developer clique, or "circle jerk" if you will. It only seems popular because you're part of a very *select* group.

These features will likely be supported when they're finished.

Can you defend this claim? Because based on my experiences *using* CSS over the last 7 years, there hasn't been a time when any version of IE could even claim they weren't maddeningly, brokenly worse.

Wow, since some snarky webtrash said it, it must be true. I tend to use the test suites when referencing this:

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-css?uas=IE7-IE8-FX3-OP9

The competing products seem to do just fine at keeping a comparable level of stability along with the pushing the envelope. In fact, given how much Opera, Mozilla, and Safari, have been able to do with resources that are orders of magnitude smaller, there's really no excuse.

Every other browser lags in enterprise oriented features such as group policies. IE has a clear marketshare in this case. It's also good at not being a moving target, so it is still favored by enterprises for things like intranets.

If we measure "better" in percents of all features (not just those in the ACID tests), then:

Browser: ......... IE6 ..| IE7 ..| FF2
HTML / XHTML . 73% ..| 73% ..| 90%
CSS 2.1 .......... 51% ..| 56% ..| 92%
CSS 3 changes . 10% ..| 13% ..| 24%
DOM ............... 50% ..| 51% ..| 79%
ECMAScript .... 99% ..| 99% ..| 100%

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-summary?IE6=on&IE7=on&FX2=on&uas=CUSTOM

html/xhtml support is about
IE7: 73%
FF2: 90%
O9: 85%

CSS 2.1
IE7: 56%
FF3: 93%
O9: 94%

Not sure about IE8, but I doubt that it can be much more than IE7.

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-summary?IE7=on&FX2=on&FX3=on&OP9=on&uas=CUSTOM

IMO, IE is closer to adhering to web standards than most browsers.

Then this is a classic example of a case where an opinion is wrong. Just look at the big table of browser compliance comparisons.

You're free to use it if you want, but you shouldn't expect web developers to stop themselves from using the standards just for the sake of one non-compliant browser. People browsing the web with lynx also can't use Slashdot's tags, but you don't see them complaining; they understand that their browser doesn't support the latest and greatest and they accept it.

IE has had the same rendering engine, Trident, since IE4 (1997). MS may claim significant improvements in standards support, but in reality, they seem to only pick the bugs that have names. After five publicly available iterations (up to IE7), why is their overall standards support at least 25% below, on a feature by feature basis, nearly every other rendering engine?

Plus, I have yet to hear anything to rebut the rumors that MS simply can't fix Trident because the code is such a mess, and they "don't want to break websites", which is one of the most backwards arguments for anything on any topic.

Which engine is closer to being fully compliant with W3C standards? I can't tell how WebKit rates.

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support?IE7=on&FX3=on&OP9=on&SF2=on&uas=CUSTOM

Tons of reasons:
-IE actually DOESN'T render things quite right, IE 8 (beta) is the closest thing they have now that's anywhere close to "standard compliant", at least in terms of CSS support. In a LOT of cases, pages only render OK in IE because of numerous CSS hacks used to make it display like every other browser, or a IE-only stylesheet is fed to it
-IE is a great way to load your system full of spyware (ActiveX junk, BHO's, toolbars and what not)
-Firefox has tons of very useful addons, like Adblock Plus, DownThemAll, Firebug, etc
-Far better standard support using other browsers, see this page for a quick overview
-IE7 is the worst memory hog of them all, look here and from what I've seen IE8 is only worse
-IE7 has the worst interface of them all, with the home button to the extreme right, the standard "toolbar" hidden by default (File/Edit/View/...), and everything else
-No session saver (when IE crashes, kiss all your tabs goodbye)
etc

There's NOTHING good to be said about IE. It's the worst POS to ever come out of Redmond (worse than WinME + Bob + Clippy combined). The only reason to still use it is for apps (like some banks) that require it, because they use ActiveX components or such.

That was not a final release. The general public doesn't use prereleases, and so prereleases don't count.

We're talking about the Acid2 test, right? The general public does not care about which browsers pass Acid2. Only web developers care. Once all popular browsers pass Acid2, they can use the features it tests. It doesn't matter whether Safari, Opera, and Firefox passed within three days of release of the Acid2 test. Web developers would still be waiting on IE to pass so they can finally use the features that Acid2 tests are have some confidence that all browsers would render their pages correctly.

That switch has been removed, and it was the only remaining obstacle.

No, the switch was not the only remaining obstacle. IE 8 Beta 1 does not pass Acid2 according to Ian Hickson because of improper cross-domain checks, not because of the meta tag.

Firefox still lags behind on the standards that people care about

Firefox and Opera render accurately, too. Firefox used to be a JavaScript slowpoke, but with the latest performance improvements, Firefox 3 is fast at JavaScript, too. I'm not trying to advocate one browser over another, just point out that there are at least three good, fast, popular browsers out there. It doesn't seem like one is generally better or worse than the others overall.

Firefox 2 is one of the most standards compliant browsers around. What other browser does significantly better overall at standards compliance than Firefox? Check out the link I provided to webdevout's information on browser standards support before you reply...

Opera far more standards compliant than Firefox? i don't think so. According to Web Devout, Opera 9 and Firefox 2 have about equal support for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and DOM standards. Let's just stop it with the Opera hype, already. It's too easy to see right through it.

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support
Generally shows that Opera is much closer to firefox that IE7 in terms of standards support. They haven't tested webkit yet, so I can't comment there.

It's about time that it dies. IE7, although not as standards compliant as... uhm... pretty much every other browser on earth, is orders of magnitude better than IE6.

ACID2 and ACID3 tests don't test if browsers are standard compatible. They only test some features. To get better overview of the standards supports, try this page:
http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-summary?IE7=on&FX2=on&OP9=on&uas=CUSTOM

Which is worse? It's severity and time of exposure.

ul.nav <-- an unordered list of the "nav" class
.nav <-- any element at all of the "nav" class
ul <-- any unordered list

Stacking selectors by separating them using a comma can be useful, but this has been done badly. The first selector alone should have been sufficient for their purposes, or the second one alone. And the third one is simply atrocious, because it makes the rule apply to EVERY unordered list in the document unless it is explicitly overridden. If there is EVER an unordered list in the document which is NOT part of the menu, it's going to be totally fubared by the menu formatting instructions. Selectors which apply to every element in the entire document are dangerous that way unless you use them really carefully or make only tiny modifications. For example, I like changing the cursor over label elements so that people will know they do something if you click them, like this:

/* Make labels for form elements have a pointer. */
label { cursor: pointer; }

The modification is very simple, does not change the basic appearance or functionality of the element, and provides a useful bit of feedback to the user.

3) Inconsistent use of whitespace. Note that sometimes a rule will start immediately after another with no whitespace, like this:

ul.nav li:active, .nav ul li a:active{
background-color: black;
color: white;
} .nav a{ <--------------- here
text-decoration: none;
}

The rule set for ".nav a" starts on the same line as the previous rule set finishes, which is ugly as sin. For improved comprehensibility, it should have at least two carriage returns after the previous rule set. And the author didn't even do it consistently.

I'll happily agree that this is an ugly bit of code. And no, the CSS pocket reference will not be especially helpful in untangling this snarl; it's a reference, for looking up properties and selectors. It shows you what individual bits do, but does not explain how the many bits may be combined. References are primarily useful when you're building your own code, and rather less so when interpreting somebody else's.

That said, I have to take issue with your conclusions.

1) "CSS is a miserable and irrational set of style tags"

First off, CSS doesn't use tags. It uses selectors to refer to tags. Second, CSS itself is not irrational. It is abstract, and takes a while to wrap your head around. It has some inadequacies and shortcomings, such as making multiple columns have an equal height or centering content vertically as well as horizontally, both of which are a serious pain in the ass. But you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. CSS also gives you quite a lot of fairly fine-grained control over your pages. Moving the presentational stuff out of your HTML makes it considerably easier to read (assuming that you don't keep throwing extraneous DIVs into it instead of learning the inheritance rules and the box model), and has truly amazing benefits

> but as far as I can see IE7 is reasonably standards compliant, probably around the Firefox 1 mark for most things

Actually IE 7 is better only in CSS 3 basic properties when compared to Firefox 1 (Firefox 2 outbeats IE 7 on that too). For everything else, including the total score for CSS 3, Firefox 1 beats IE 7:
http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-summary?IE7=on&FX1=on&FX2=on&uas=CUSTOM

Here are some highlights:
Tech IE 7 Firefox 1
HTML / XHTML 73% 90%
CSS 2.1 56% 88%
CSS 3 changes 13% 14%
DOM 51% 79%
ECMAScript 99% 100%

I could have added Firefox 2 there too, but that would have made IE 7 look ever more bad. And just wait when IE 3 comes out. The version whichs rendering engine they have been working on since Firefox 1.5 was released. IE 7 is marginally better than IE 6, but even very old browsers still beat it.

If you check out Web browser standards support summary from Web Devout you can see Firefox 2 (and of course other Mozilla-based browsers) and Konqueror have some pretty good standards support. It's really just IE that doesn't support the standards well, judging from the fact that IE has the lowest percentage of support in most categories.

> IE7 also fixes a lot of HTML rendering and CSS bugs. Definately not all, but a considerable amount.

Considerable amount?
html/xhtml support went from 73% to 73%
css 2.1 support went from 51% to 56%

Yeah, sure that is better than before, but they are still far behind the other browsers:
Firefox 2:
html/xhtml: 90%
css 2.1: 92%

Opera 9:
html/xhtml: 85%
css 2.1: 94%

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-summary

Content and presentation have been slowly merging over the course of the web. Adding these semantic tags appears to be an attempt to separate the presentation from the content.

Do you have any evidence to back up this sweeping statement? In my opinion this was the case from the early days of the web, through the original browser wars and for a period afterwards (until maybe '01-02) at which point people started realising that contaminating the markup with presentational cruft was a good way to create maintainability nightmares, and made major redesigns of medium to large sites a frustrating and time-consuming (thus costly) process.

The trouble is that nobody will add the new tags until a majority of browsers support HTML5. And nobody will be interested in upgrading until the major sites require it (or until the format is slowly merged in during users normal upgrade schedules).

This is, of course, very true (and I forsee Internet Explorer lagging behind the other 'major' browser vendors), however this can be said about any new web specifications (the XHTML 1.0 spec was released as a recommendation in January 2000, and IE doesn't support it in any way, shape or form*).

Add that to the fact that the current generation of browsers don't agree on implementations within HTML4, and I suspect that this will not really help us web developers.

Nowadays, the commonly used browsers (>IE6, Gecko based browsers, Konq, Safari, Opera) all implement a large subset of the HTML 4 spec, although you are right that there are some presentational issues (mostly due to the fact that the spec is vague in places) these can be eliminated with a judicious application of CSS rules.

Personally i'm glad that the w3 have taken the helm wrt the HTML5 spec - I had major problems with the direction that WHATWG were going with it. A specific example is their introduction of the presentational font element; their note that it should only be used by WYSIWIG tools and to be syntactically valid said tool must add a special meta element is laughably nieve. As the font element has no semantic meaning and no benefit over the equally semantically meaningless span element with a suitable styling via CSS - sure you could argue it offers backwards compatibility with legacy documents, however I would assume that a document that is not syntactically valid HTML4 would need major work to be cleaned up to be valid HTML5 anyway (plus, that would be disobeying the spirit of the spec, being as such content would not be generated by a WYSIWIG editor).

Another worry is that they're integrating DOM stuff into the same spec, although it does make sense in some ways it seems like there is the distinct potential of losing focus by covering too diverse a set of problems. However, it is still early days yet and I will withhold judgement until we start seeing near-finalised drafts and browsers start implementing some of the new features.

* However, it can (mostly) deal with it if you (incorrectly, IMO, despite appendix C) send the mime-type as text/html and skip the XML prologue by parsing it as 'tag soup'.

The goal of the Firefox is to support standards also and they are improving on that area with ener new Gecko release. In the current versions Firefox already has better html/xhtml and css3 support than Opera. IE is far behind in everything:

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-summary

One of the primary goals behind Firefox/Gecko is standards compliance and, as far as I know, Firefox is the most compliant browser out there, categorically speaking.

Adverb: categorically `katu'górik(u)lee
In an unqualified manner
- flatly, unconditionally

I hardly think that's called for. As you can read in this discussion, Konqueror has supported this for six months, Opera will, Firefox won't for a while. And if you look at the summary table here, you'll see that while Firefox wins by 5% in HTML and CSS3, Opera wins by 3% in CSS2 and 5% in DOM. That's hardly an unconditional win for Firefox. Gecko is nothing unique, it's one of three very standards compliant engines together with KHTML (konq and safari) and Opera. Yes, it beats IE by far but IE belongs in the special olympics.

Although Gecko supports more extensions, I would argue that WebCore is more standards compliant. As far as I know no Gecko based browser has passed the ACID2 test yet.

I'd disagree with your statement and moreover you're reasoning is fallacious. You're implying that either passing (or not) the Acid2 test acts as a good metric on which to judge how well a browser supports the CSS2 standard, an obviously false assumption being as the Acid2 test only ensures support for a tiny subset of the standard it claims to support. The only reasonable way to compare support would be to go through the specification and test the individual components work (for example webdevout's comparison of Firefox, Opera & IE) and then putting each browser through a comprehensive set of test pages and comparing how they render them compared to an expected example render as well as each other. Anything less is a purely subjective judgement.

My (purely subjective) opinion on the matter is that right now (Firefox 2 & Safari 2) are roughly equal in their support for the standards I use daily as a web developer - both have areas that are lacking wrt each other. However, i've recently been playing with the Firefox 3 nightlies and I'm inclined to think that Gecko 1.9 might give Fx3 an advantage when compared to Safari 3 in their respective current states.

http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_summary.p hp
http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_css.php

http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_summary.p hp
http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_css.php

scramble to build a web browser that was a first in the world of Microsoft: it was standards compliant. Okay, actually, it wasn't

You can say that again; for most of the referenced table, it's a case of spot-the-difference between IE6 and IE7. Always makes me laugh when people say IE7 is standards-compliant.

More fuel on the fire.

I'm the Lead Web Developer for a company and I hate IE. I had held out some hope that the fn morons that are developing it would get a clue but they didn't. Just have a look at:

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-css

I'd really like to ditch all the crappy tables but IE is so screwed up I'm stuck in the 90's with page design.

CSS 3 is so cool I can't wait to use the print capabilities but at the rate Microslow is developing IE I'll be retired before they even get freak'n css 2.1 working. How many Billions of dollars? And this is all we get?

I'm a Lead Web Dev and I hate IE.

I'm sure there's a good reason for it defaulting to XHTML compliance, and I'm just as sure it has nothing to do with adherence to standards. Check this article on XHTML note the IE 7 doesn't even render XHTML properly, and ask yourself why they're outputting XHTML by default. It smacks of vendor lock-in to me.

Someone drank the IE7 kool-aid.

IE7's improved standard support is minimal. See for yourself at webdevout.net. IE7 still sucks golf balls through garden hose compared to all other modern browsers when it comes to standards support. IE5/6/7 now deserve all the ire and hated that developers held for Netscape 4 whe IE4 was new.

If the developer community drops IE6, it should drop it in favor of a browser with more than a 56% aggregated compliance percentage. A 2% improvement is not what I would call massive. Gecko (Firefox, et al), Opera, and KHTML/Webkit all enjoy at least 90% compliance.

IE is today's legacy browser, even version 5.7^H^H^H7.

Css browser support. Pretty good guide. If you design for FF or Opera and don't use any hairy CSS, it should look pretty good in IE7 (assuming you're using a decent DOCTYPE) and can be tamed in IE6 with a few tweaks to fix things like the broken box model and such.

Interesting thing I noticed when scrolling through the guide linked above - the level of css support between IE6 and IE7 isn't all that different (maybe a handful of new items supported). So, IE7 was mainly a bugfix release. Five years and they finally fixed the CSS engine. Way to go MS.

If you can't see the sarcasm dripping from above, check your glasses.

I think Firefox 2 vs. IE7 is still a no-brainer. Secunia reports IE7 still has more security vulnerabilities than Firefox 2. IE7 still lags in standards support compared to Firefox 2. I do agree that Mozilla needs to put more emphasis on getting Firefox to corporate users, such as making Firefox MSIs available. When they do, that will just make Firefox all the more popular.

...and we're still waiting for a complete CSS2 implementation. Though to be fair, CSS2 is only 8.5 years old, and has been undergone a couple of minor revisions. I've seen good comparisons of browser support for CSS2 and CSS3. Anyone know of a good summary of current browsers' CSS1 support?

> Maybe Opera does 'support all the standards' and FF has a few IE-like nicities

Well, I'm afraid it doesn't. But, you can check the percentage of the standards each browser supports from here:
http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_summary.p hp?uas=IE7-FX2-OP9

Firefox is slightly better on html and CSS 3, but Opera does have better support for DOM and CSS2. Everyone can propably guess where IE is.

Not exactly what you're looking for, but this is a good place to start: http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support.php

See I'm not a fan of the pure CSS sites. [It] makes updates and general maintenance a pain. We've done a few sites that way and they are the ones I hate working on when [the] client calls with updates, enhancements, etc. ... I can make a table and format a page in two seconds, versus looking up styles or creating new ones, using guess and check, checking all browsers. ... Tables don't cause any problems if they're done correctly, so why make my life more difficult to use pure CSS, when 9 [out of] 10 times the site is going to be very graphically driven.

The problem with being the #1 browser in the world is that if they did decide to fix everything all at once, then they break a LOT of websites.

The funny thing is, they're still breaking pages just by updating smaller parts their of CSS implementation, but only those pages that are in the standards compliant mode (CSS1Compat). It's effectively impossible for them to change the rendering engine without breaking a lot of things for a lot of people, because many pages use user-agent sniffing and not CSS hacks (those don't apply to IE7 outside of quirks mode), or use conditional comments that include IE7 to feed different versions of CSS. This means that even if they achieved CSS support parity with the modern browsers, and fixed all the CSS hacks (as they already did), IE7 would still sometimes get the old CSS meant for earlier versions, and break pages.

This is what they get for taking so many years with fixing CSS in IE! Not that they've improved it much if you look at this chart. The IE 6 and 7 columns look practically the same. So, IE7 is still not a modern browser in this regard. And this is why IE7 just means another bug-ridden rendering engine to support if you develop in standards compatible mode, until IE6 is dead. And looking at how even fifth generation IEs are still around in significant numbers, I wouldn't hold my breath on IE6 going away in the next few years, Windows Update or not.

There's a built-in derogatory slant to your question. I believe that IE supports more than 50% of CSS standards, which would mean they went further than half-way. Your choice of words is subtly antagonistic.

You're quoting CSS 2.1 Conformance only. The full list of compliance tests (IE6,IE7,FF1.5,Opera 9, impossible to align well):
CSS 2.1 Units 96% 96% Y 97%
CSS 2.1 Importance I I Y Y
CSS 2.1 At-rules 21% 21% 43% Y
CSS 2.1 Basic selectors 23% 64% 86% 77%
CSS 2.1 Pseudo-classes 29% 36% 93% 93%
CSS 2.1 Pseudo-elements 25% 25% 63% 63%
CSS 2.1 Basic properties 55% 58% 97% 97%
CSS 2.1 Print properties 38% 38% 42% 92%
CSS 2.1 Conformance 43% 43% Y 86%

When you look at the grand total at the bottom here you get:

CSS 2.1 support:
IE 6: 51%
IE 7: 57%
Firefox 1.5: 91%
Opera 9: 94%

So, this shows that
a) IE7 is an improvement over IE6 (though admittingly not impressive)
b) Firefox isn't perfect, like you'd be mislead to believe
c) Opera is actually the most standards-compliant browser

But hey, there's lies, damn lies and statistics, but noone would ever use that to try to make closed-source appear worse than it is, and open source better than it is would they?

IE7's CSS (and other standards) support hasn't changed since RC1. They've said this.

For a complete report on IE7's support, see WebDevout.com. For those thjo lazy (or embarrassed) to click the link, here's a summary of CSS 2.1 support:

• Firefox: 100%
• Opera 9: 86%
• IE6: 43%
• IE7: 43%

In the grand scheme of things, what they did to improve IE7's CSS support is statistically insignificant. They basically took all the IE7 bug pages on the net and cherry picked what they felt like fixing.

Make no mistake: IE7 is little more than a marketing effort attempting to stave off the rise of other demonstrably better browsers. The few fixes they did put in are going to cause even more problems for developers who decide to support it (I'm not) because of how, which, and in what context the bugs are fixed.

Why would they when other people are already doing that

"Besides having far better CSS support than Firefox 2.0, Konqueror also uses..."

Simple not true.

You can compare Firefox 2.0 and Konqueror on Web Devout.

It shows that Firefox is much better in CSS and other standard features than Konqueror.

I'd check my info if I were you.
http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_css.php
Search for "opacity" on that page.

Opera and Explorer (both 6 and 7) support the standard "opacity" just fine. Firefox doesn't, it uses -moz-opacity instead.

Microsoft have only from my reckoning only implemented 58% of the CSS 2.0 framework, compared to figures in the 90's for other browsers (I have no direct source for these figures this info- so may be wrong)

You're probably thinking of this table.

Now to be fair, Firefox doesn't adhere entirely to standards either, or at least not the latest ones. It comes a lot closer, but I won't give it (or any other browswer) that until it'll pass the ACID2 test, which I believe only Safari and Opera do currently. Last I heard, full compliance wasn't slated until Fx 3.0, but that might be incorrect.

Safari, Opera, Konqueror, and iCab. Plus one HTML-to-PDF converter and a mobile browser. There's a great list of Acid2 status here. And yes, Firefox is looking at passing Acid2 with 3.0.

Something to keep in mind, though, is that Acid2 doesn't indicate a particular level of compliance. It's not a test that says, "OK, you pass CSS version X and HTML version Y," but a test that checks several previously neglected parts of the specs. If you think of the specs as being a floor, and a browser's compliance as being the part of the floor that is painted, Acid2 checks the corners. It's possible to have all the corners filled in, but still have a missing chunk in the middle.

The best compliance comparison I've found is, unfortuantely, missing full data for Safari. It shows Opera 9 ahead of Firefox 1.5 on CSS 2.1 and DOM, and Firefox ahead of Opera on HTML and new parts of CSS 3. It's hard to say how one should weight those, and again numbers are missing for Safari, but if I were to guess, I'd say that in overall standards compliance, Firefox 1.5 is probably ahead of Safari 2, and Opera 9 is probably ahead of Firefox 1.5 -- despite the fact that Opera and Safari both pass Acid2 and Firefox does not.

If you know how to code properly and comply with standards set by w3c, IE has minimal problems.

Given the dismal level of CSS support in IE (57% of CSS 2.1 in IE7, compared to upwards of 90% for Firefox 1.5 and Opera 9), it's quite easy to write properly standards-compliant CSS that IE just doesn't understand.

Writing standards-compliant code is a good start, but you also have to do one or more of the following:

1. Limit yourself to features that are implemented in Internet Explorer.
2. Accept that IE won't display your page quite the same as other browsers do.
3. Try to work around the missing functionality, differing interpretations, or bugs such that IE will do what you want. Unfortunately, this often involves adding non-standard code or re-mingling presentation into your content.

Of course, the same is true of any other browser that you choose to support, since no one has managed to cover 100% of the specs, never mind 100% bug-free. But given the much higher levels of support the top ones provide, you're less likely to encounter a showstopping gap in Firefox or Opera's presentation. (It does happen, just to a much lesser extent.)

if you are having major problems, your code must not be up to par with w3c's standards.

See, this is why I like to refer to "specs" rather than "standards." Calling something a specification is unambiguous: it's a document that specifies what something (in this case, a browser) should do. A standard could be, as in W3C standards, a standard way of doing something, or it could be a standard against which something is measured. Standards-compliant code is not code which is "up to standard," but code that follows the standard way of using CSS, HTML, etc. -- well-formed, no errors, not relying on proprietary features, etc. A standards-compliant browser is one which complies with the standard way of displaying CSS, HTML, etc.

EvilML is a great example of the two meanings of standard: it's standards-compliant, as it's a valid HTML 4.01 Strict document. But I wouldn't consider it "up to standard" in terms of good coding practices, cross-browser or not.

Semantics are also very important. Do you code with semantics in mind?

OK, now you're just being silly. Semantics are great for maintenance, search-friendly sites, and producing clean code, but they're on the content side. CSS is the presentation side. But I suppose you get bonus points for buzzword use.