The W3C and Microsoft

[mephisto_kur]

It is in Microsoft's best interest to not comply fully with the standards.  Look at the arguments people pop up with here.  Even Unknown has said he thinks you should program for IE.  Why?  Because it is 90% of the market share.  If they became standards compliant, all those sites that only work in IE would not work, plus there would be no reason other than the time it takes to download Firebird to stop people from switching away even faster.  As long as sites work okay in IE, and web programmers don't force MS to follow the rules *en mass*, we will have faulty browsers from MS.  I would be downright *stunned* if IE 7 is more than a smidge better than IE6.

[Tyris]

mmmm, good point... even so... I still reckon it'd be great if everything complied 100%, I'd have no problem converting my pages to something thats 100% compliant..

[[Unknown]]

Longhorn..... except the plugin thing, but that's a downgrade.

They aren't going to make an IE 7 for XP.  At least according to them...

-[Unknown]

Or maybe they plan to add more features and just not call it IE 7.  Either way I doubt there will be many changes to actual DOM handling...

http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5105139.html?tag=nefd_top

-[Unknown]

[Haase]

The problem that I see with Microsoft here isn't the fact that they're going to go ahead and add colored scrollbars...  yeah...  colored scrollbars...  if you want to do that you can do it.  (I wouldn't bother).  Although it *would* be nice if I can control the border on a select box like I can control the border on a textarea...  Nothing like having a nice complete crisp looking web form, ruined by an ugly ass select box right in the middle of it.  But I digress...

The problem is the way that Microsoft approaches standards in general.  They have this cart before the horse kind of strategy where they say...  "okay, this is the way we coded things... so this should be the standard."  Where-as everyone else sits around and says...  "Okay, we need to do some coding... what are the standards we should follow"

To me, it's just another part of Microsofts business strategy...  if we make it first, then it becomes a standard, then by the time everyone else adopts it, we'll be at least 1 year ahead of them.  (Everyone who wants colored scrollbars in 2005 will by Longhorn immediately as apposed to waiting until 2006 for it to become a standard and appear everywhere else in 2006).

This is just the tip of the iceberg, really.  I was reading in Software Development times this afternoon that Longhorn will also contain some proprietary XML technology.  There will be a lot of things in Longhorn that takes a basis from "standards" and then blows them out so that they're incompatible with everything else.  For the normal everyday desktop user, it doesn't really matter.  But I think Microsoft is really going to bite themselves in the butt, because it's the developers who are starting to get miffed about it, and ultimately these are the people that create the things that go on the desktop.

Pretty soon it's going to be so that only Microsoft products will work on a Microsoft Operating System - which is just the way that Bill Gates wants things...  if he's not careful, he's going to get his wish.