Web Standards & Microsoft

This is the most complete article i have come across for sometime, of how much Microsoft is degrading Web Standards initiative. Anything which is of open source & open minded in nature, cannot be taken so seriously by MS, and they will pay the price years later.

Some of the excerpts from the article....

" While Microsoft may pay lip service to web standards, a look at their product line suggests they have no interest in supporting the standards they’ve helped create. Face it, xHTML and CSS just aren’t as sexy as .Net and web services. Microsoft clearly has other priorities and a closer investigation of the facts seems to indicate that support for web standards is hardly a blip on their corporate radar."

"As one developer on Microsoft’s Channel 9 blog recently noted about Visual Studio, “creating xHTML compliant websites is a pain in the ASP.net”. In the know Microsoft developers speak in hushed tones about ‘Whidbey’, the next generation .Net development tool that will reportedly support xHTML and CSS (no, these same insiders don’t seem to think it’s strange that the current set of tools don’t already support web standards). "

"Microsoft Word: I’ve written at length on a couple of occasions about Microsoft Word’s inability to easily export documents to clean xHTML. "

" Internet Explorer. Standards compliant web developers are well aware of the myriad of hacks required to effectively use web standards in the most popular web browser on the planet. It’s as if Microsoft takes pleasure in making the simplest tasks near impossible. Search Google for Interent Explorer CSS Hacks and you’ll find tens of thousands of pages devoted to working around Microsoft’s browser. It’s been noted that these same hacks will likely come back to haunt us all at some point in the future. It seems quite apparent that IE’s CSS quirks are greatly responsible for many web developers’ failure to embrace xHTML and CSS as the standard method for developing websites. IE’s poor support for standards has given a generation of web designers the impression that the standards are broken. "

" If Opera and Mozilla are capable of supporting web standards, why can’t Microsoft? In fact, it seems like small, independent software developers and the Open Source movement are leading the way, while Microsoft is barely keeping pace, despite its presence in the organization responsible for developing these standards. "

"Regardless of what Microsoft’s excuse may be, the fact is that the current incarnation of their product line lacks any meaningful support for web standards, something that they will have to face head on as they move forward with their recently publicized accessibility initiative. They can’t achieve their goals without addressing the problems they’ve created – and the tools they’ll be using will not help. Considering Microsoft’s dominance in the marketplace, it’s remarkable that the standards movement has made as much progress as it has in the past couple of years."

Get the complete article over here

Long live Microsoft!! and we are giving the next generation a world full of code errors, hacks, quirks & round abouts and not a clean education & info. about how we can utilise the web.