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WSP Petitions MS to Make IE Meet W3C Standards
Eric Krock writes "The Web Standards Project has launched a petition drive to pressure Microsoft to fully support HTML 4.0, CSS1, DOM1, and XML in IE." Like it or not, IE is currently the most widely-used WWW browser. Since Microsoft is under a lot of pressure to act (or at least pretend to act) nice nowadays, a large number of polite requests to make their browser products fully support current and future W3C standards just might do some good.
Mozilla is a pre-beta product, and therefore not under serious consideration as a desktop browser. We're discussing release browsers, which is currently a competition between Opera v3.61, MSIE v5.0, and Netscape v4.61. I personally prefer Opera, then MSIE, and Netscape comes in dead last.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Where I work we get quite a bit of web traffic. Quite a bit meaning more than 99% of all the web sites out there and IE doesn't get more usage than Netscape in fact...
F /...
Mozilla/4.* 51%
MSIE 4.* 38.5%
MSIE 3.* 3.5%
Mozilla/3.* 3.5%
And then everything else... I've seen some stats from some other very high traffic sites and they mirror ours as well.
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Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
The WSP was after Netscape about a year ago for the same thing.
The current Mozilla/ NS 5.0 layout engine, that supports these standards (known as NGlayout) was not originally going to be part of NS 5.0. The WSP lobbyied Netscape to use NGlayout in the 5.0 browser, Netscape change their mind.
Since Mozilla AKA Netscape 5.0, does appear to pass the standards tests and is trying to adhear to standards, there is no need to lobby Netscape at this time, except to maybe make it happen faster.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
As many other posters have pointed out, 100% compliance with W3 is something of a rarity with most popular browsers (which means IE and Netscape).
It seems that in cases where browsers break compliance, it is usually to extend the standard with proprietary tags. IIRC, Netscape started this with such vileness as the BLINK tag (please correct me if I'm wrong here). They took a lot of flak for that one, too.
I've been working quite a bit with XML lately and IE5's support for it. It's not that Microsoft has broken W3 specs -- they've just gone and implemented stuff which is still in the W3 suggestion box. XSL may be an example of this.
I think what MS is trying to do here is make a best guess at what will be recommended by W3. I'm sure they know that the final standard may well invalidate their current implementation. There were, for example, significant changes in XML support between IE4 and IE5. This may be because the XML standards were more solid by the time IE5 was released.
A friend of mine was working on an HTML generator and was in a similar position. It is really hard trying to write a standards-compliant implementation when the standards are not yet finalized. It's also frustrating knowing that today's code will have to be completely changed in 3 months.
I think the real risk is that IE5's implementation may become entrenched as a de facto standard before W3 makes a decision. By going ahead and implementing standards in a browser with majority marketshare, MS may make the W3 standard moot. Pragmatic web designers probably care a lot more about how pages look than whether or not they are compliant. What good are standards if only a handful of browsers follow them, anyway?
I haven't worked on Mozilla any, but I would love for someone on the Moz team to comment on W3 standards and proposals. How much do they change? Have you had to make any major code changes as a result?
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Alot of the posts here seem to indicate that people are suspecting that the WSP has an anti-MS stance. I remember a year ago, before it was decided that Mozilla would be 100% compliant, I was reading messages on the Mozilla site, and the people there seemed to thing that the WSP was anti-Netscape.
A goal of the WSP is to have the two major browsers be compliant. Since Mozilla is already working towards that goal, there's nothing to petition there at this time.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
"...crashes...with spelling mistakes in the HTML."
:)
Yeah! My compiler won't compile my code unless I spell keywords right! It sucks too!
/* This was meant to be taken with humor, not as a flame. */
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Section 1.0
:)
Paragraph a:
When running javascript, all behavior shall be considered undefined.
It is recommended that the implementor:
1) Pop up annoying banner ads which never can be killed.
2) Generate a minimum of three errors per page.
3) Randomly close the browser in the middle of rendering a page.
The coming standard is also expected to recommend forwarding your e-mail address to random spammer groups.
Hope this helps.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Didn't they have similar requests with the last series of Netscape versions (ie: 4.x, 4.5x)
The big question is: Does Mozilla already conform to these standards?
I would think that if there was any other popular browser out there that did conform to the standards, then maybe MS would be more willing to conform.
Until that time, I doubt that they will waste much time trying to do anything "correctly."
On a related note: Would they then be forced to change Frontpage to produce compliant pages? That would be nice. Since every Joe Bob idiot is using Frontpage to right "Joe Bob's Home Page". Am I really missing out when I can't read "Joe Bob's Home Page?" Probably not, but many of my co-workers use it too, and though they are smart enough to realize what they are doing, it doesn't stop them.
Add Opera to the list (It might have bugs, but
their goal is standard-complience, and not
diverisity from that).
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST: