spiderwebwoman

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!