Scoble assures us that it is untrue that Microsoft doesn’t want to comply with the W3C standards. Dave Massy from the IE team calls it a myth that Microsoft doesn’t support standards.
Still, the newest addition to Microsofts IE-marketing, the IEBlog, indicates the opposite. As do every known blog run by members of the IE team.
I realize validation isn’t the end-all, be-all of standards compliance. However I would expect, that the development team that has to struggle with parsing and rendering the bottomless bowls of tag soup making up the WWW today would be a little more concerned about outputting proper HTML.
To be fair, it seems like they’re simply relying on some internal blogging/CMS tool and the real culprit is this tool.
Here’s to hoping that Microsoft will some day put their money where their mouth is, and actual show the world that they understand, know and care about webstandards. Producing a single semantic, validating website would be nice first step.
What can I say? The validation results speak for themselves! But for us honest hard-working webdesigners out here struggling with the challenges of XHTML 1.1 (strict!) is seems quite ironic that the IE team can’t even get HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL to work…
How about this pre-historic markup: mixed CSS and ‘font tags: “”
if that’s the future of IE then this Longhorn Explorer will get savaged by a Tiger on a Safari or have its nose burnt by a raging Firefox. Hey Micro$oft, how about spending some of your loot on your customers (read: “victims”)!!!
This was what I meant: line 142:
SPAN style=”FONT-SIZE: 12pt”
FONT face=Verdana (font tag, not CSS)
FONT size=2 (font tag, not CSS)
how about just one CSS: style=”font: 12pt Verdana;”…
This markup micro$ucks!
Most of the Microsoft Bloggers use .Text which is an ASP.NET blogging tool. Unfortunately, the programming model that ASP.NET uses is not pretty for user interface people to work on. Modifying a .Text skin (to make it standards compliant) is about 50 times more difficult that a moveable type one.
In addition, ASP.NET has a lot of other nasty hacks to make a (windows) forms style model work with HTTP/HTML. If you know enought you can work around them, but most developers are not aware, or do not care. These include every page being a form (look at the form tag placement), nasty javascript inserted in many places, and a hidden form field that acts like a cookie, session object*.
Microsoft has actually took a step to web standards. Their Swedish site is tablefree! But it doesnt validate tho.
Actually, I am pretty sure that they do want to follow standards. However, I do believe one of the following are true, 1) they don’t know how to code, 2) they are lazy and do not want to try to comply since it takes time, 3) no one knows how to read standards. There are many engines out there have have complied, I think MS teams need to do the same. Myth? I don’t think so, more like truth.
Validation isn’t all its cracked up to be sometimes - even Google’s front page has over 100 errors in validation….
The problem is: if there web site are validated they have to recode there stupid browser !!
That swedish site make be tableless, but it sure isn’t semantically nice — I see a ton of a tags with br at their close… god knows a list would have been much simplier.