Ok ok, maybe I don't. Not really, anyway.
But, as a web designer, a web programmer and a web site owner/maintainer, I tend to be interested in the statuses of the big "players" in the web-technology field.
As we all know, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 not
too long ago, and in a drastic change of corporate policy, are already working on IE 8. This is a good thing. Better implementation of standards, fixing bugs, blah blah, the usual stuff. Everyone who designed their websites to the letter of the law will work fine.
However, while this all sounds good from a "idealist" point of view, we have to ground ourselves in reality, and remember that not all websites are crafted by God Himself, and old websites are just plain broken. How will they fare in the new future?
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html (Warning: Long article, but very interesting and worthwhile)
The basic summary is a contrast between two
vastly incompatible viewpoints: Standards compliance and backwards compatibility.
Let's pretend for a moment that Microsoft decided to shed off its un-compliant past, and make things work properly for all sites everywhere. Well, God-crafted sites will benefit, but that's about it. Everyone else's site will explode in a mess of <div> tags and other nastiness. This is bad, because noone's site will work.
Or, they could maintain their mistakes, and be forgiving to those sites which weren't made properly, as was the paradigm of the 90s. This means emulating old bugs (such as positioning bugs), so that the "work arounds" to those bugs will be good. This also means that a new site which doesn't take these bugs into account will explode in a mess of <div> tags and other nastiness. This is also bad, because proper sites won't work.
Overall, I'd hate to be in Microsoft's shoes. There is no easy answer, and the result of this battle could determine the future of the Internet.
(I don't mean to sound clichéd, but it's true.)
Discuss.
