Vitamin: The majority of users in the world use IE. Some people would argue that we should be standardizing around Microsoft, instead of the other way around. What do you think?
Standardization around a singular piece of proprietary software is antithetical to the whole vision of the Web. That’s the first problem with the premise: It’s philosophically wrong.
From a more practical perspective, relying on a singular source for software puts both consumers and developers at the mercy of Microsoft. We would be forever dependent on their Operating System and other software releases. This would push us away from open source solutions and therefore affordable and flexible development and design options.
Sure, a one platform approach would solve the immediate problems of incompatibilities between browsers, but that problem emerged precisely because browsers didn’t focus as much on W3C implementations as they should have from the beginning.
We don’t live in a one-size-fits all world. It’d be pretty sad if we did. What if every tall guy had to buy his trousers in a size standard meant for “average” sized people. Where’s the fun in that?
I think a point many people fail to realize is that the W3C working groups are comprised of W3C Members that include implementers. Sit in on an HTML or CSS working group and you can bet the room is filled with Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Adobe and other corporate representatives.
The implementers are by and large the ones making W3C specs, so there’s a dark irony here that at the end of the day, an approach might be agreed upon and then not implemented in favor of other features. Some of this is due to practical reasons such as difficulty implementing a particular feature in a given codebase. Another would be if priorities within the project lifecycle of a browser have to take precedence, such as patching gaping security holes.
Vitamin: Has Microsoft made any positive moves with IE7 that demonstrate a direction towards Web Standards?
Standards have come to the forefront of Microsoft discussion lately.
I think it’s critical that Web designers and developers at large make a clean separation in their minds of what is the business strategy of Microsoft and what goes on with the developers building the software. At Mix06 I was sitting with Andy Clarke in a session and the term “web standards” was used no less than five times in the first 15 minutes. He turned to me and quipped “are we at the right conference?”
Witty, but the reality is that Microsoft’s business strategy has definitely realized that for now, at least, there’s good PR in talking about and implementing standards. That’s the business.
The developer perspective is another story entirely. There are folks working on IE7 such as Chris Wilson who has spent his entire career since the early days of Mosaic building browsers, being involved in the CSS Working Group at the W3C. This is a man with a great deal of passion for making a great browser, and possibly one of the very few people who has perspective but who also faces huge challenges. He has to manage the business priorities with a desire to truly bring the IE browser up to par.
Markus Mielke and a slew of other developers are so passionate about the subject that it is sobering to talk to these guys face to face and realize they are as much standards evangelists as any of us can be in the industry. That they’re faced with a very, very difficult task; that they are in between a hard rock and a harder place is unquestionable. This isn’t their fault.
Hate Microsoft if you want, but please don’t ever think that the developers themselves are anything but our colleagues fighting the hardest fight of all.
Vitamin: Will IE ever be completely Standards compliant?
Will anything? There is no browser today that can claim that, and the evolutionary, iterative nature of open standards development will ensure that browsers and user agents in general will always be short on something.
It’s the nature of an evolutionary industry and it should be part of what keeps people interested in and invigorated by the challenge of constant change. Stability is not something I expect to see in standards in the duration of our careers, and thinking it’ll ever be that way is, in my opinion, a very dangerous attitude.
Vitamin: What will be the state of the browser landscape in two years?
We’ll have much better CSS, much improved DOM in desktop computers. We’ll see more native SVG and other technologies. We’ll also see continued growth and confusion with mobile browsers, with more and more support for handheld styles but a wide range of browser support issues. I hope we’ll see more standards support in assistive device technologies.
I think we’ll also find that the tools we use will improve a great deal, but one thing is going to remain true: We need to constantly learn and challenge ourselves to keep up with the realities. Again, it’s the nature of our industry, which is in the earliest stages of its evolutionary process.
Vitamin: What is WaSP and why does it exist?
WaSP is the Web Standards Project, founded in 1998 by a group of concerned Web designers and developers who wanted to help advocate better, more consistent support for standards, specifically the DOM at the time and very soon thereafter, CSS.
WaSP continues to be a driving force in terms of creating relationships between web designers and developers; tools and device developers and of course browser implementers.
Vitamin: What’s your role at WaSP?
I’m the Group Lead. You’ve no doubt heard the old saying about herding cats? Well, that’s what I do within the organization. I also act as a liaison between other groups such as the W3C, and work on several WaSP Task Forces. My own focus over the last year has been with Microsoft, as that relationship opened up and it’s been a very eye-opening experience to say the least.
Vitamin: Why did you get involved?
Because Zeldman asked me to, and who says no to Zeldman?
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I’m confused :( Is this Molly interviewing some unknown character, or is it some unknown character interviewing Molly, or Molly interviewing Molly?
I think it’s Vitamin interviewing Holly.
Yeah, it’s much clearer now. Thanks.
[…] Vitamin Features » Will the Standards Battle Ever be Won? […]
Vitamin Features » Will the Standards Battle Ever be Won?…
Vitamin Features » Will the Standards Battle Ever be Won?
……
With all due respect, I don’t feel that any information was gleaned from that interview at all. Perhaps working so closely with Microsoft requires Molly to be overly-diplomatic, but I felt the questions went unanswered, either due to lack of knowledge or the use of kid gloves. It doesn’t matter to me if every single member of the IE team is a standards-tooting W3C member; do those people have the power and freedom within MS to enact change, or are their hands tied to “security hole patching”, uglifying the toolbar, and only improving the standards compliance every five years (and even then, to two-years-behind levels)?
The pace of MS’s standards development in IE has lagged so far behind the industry — aside from the one-time innovation that was IE5/Mac — that all the assurances in the world of “good inside men” means nothing to us developers who have to work outside MS, in the real world. Will IE ever catch up to Firefox and Safari? Will MS allow IE7 to stagnate like IE6 did, or will they release point releases that improve the standards compliance like, well, every other browser maker does?
I applaud the efforts of the WaSP, but since this alliance with MS, it seems that diplomacy has rendered their language somewhat impotent. If that’s what finally brought IE7 up to where it is now, I apologize and yay diplomacy. But otherwise, let’s kick some ass and get MS up to speed.
Why shouldn’t Microsoft just contribute manpower to the Mozilla team and build on top of that - that’s better PR then just putting focus on standards?
For that matter, what’s the business case for IE7?
Great interview.
After reading the first question, what I had in mind reflected perfectly Molly’s answer.
I say Yes, SOMEDAY the standards battle will be won. I’m still not sure Molly’s opinion. Interesting read though.
Jökull,
There is no way that MS is going to put manpower into building up Mozilla. If you remember correctly, this is exactly the thing Netscape tried to do at the bitter end and it stymied development for years (though it did ultimately lead to Firefox, but that’s not helping Netscape out any).
As for the business case, I can think of two very simple cases:
1. The more people using MS products, the better.
2. MS has the ability to embed more MS products into their own browser, such as making MSN the default search engine. Elements like this figure to be a key weapon in the MS fight against Google in the coming years.
As CTO Craig Mundie says in The World is Flat, MS “fundamentally believe[s] in a commercial software industry, and some variants of the open-source model attack the economic model that allows companies to build businesses in software.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no MS apologist, I just wanted to point out that if you let MS into the same room as the Mozilla developers, the likely end-game would be no more Mozilla.
Thanks for commenting Sean.
I can understand Microsoft’s pursuit of the IE brand - but why not just build that on top of Mozilla’s already capable engine? Branding a speedy version of Mozilla’s Gecko with an MSN home page and IE logo isn’t any different to the end user then IE7.
What difference would it make to Microsoft’s business aside from perhaps saving time and money? Maybe I’m being naive.
Not that I’ve followed the Netscape -> Firefox shift very closely, but isn’t Mozilla today (with active open-source projects) completely different from the business Netscape was trying to build some years ago (structurally and logically)? Google may have different goals but their contribution to Mozilla seems to be working fine (correct me if I’m wrong).
I also don’t understand how adhering to standards is in any way opposing Microsoft’s business plans. I can see the case for MS Office but having your own CSS box-model just doesn’t make sense.
I’m not saying Microsoft should do this or that; I’m just struggling to understand them.
[…] While some people have recently commented that WaSP’s voice has been neutralized by our relationship with Microsoft via the WaSP Microsoft Task force, I beg to differ. Those of us here at WaSP that are working to help support the developers within Microsoft as they make their software more standards-compliant know all too well that there is a snakepit of complexity involved, a reality with which any working Web professional is sure to be familiar. […]
Will the Standards Battle Ever be Won?…
Vitamin poses the following:
“The majority of users in the world use IE. Some people would argue that we should be standardizing around Microsoft, instead of the other way around. What do you think?”
Find out what Molly (of molly.com) and t…
So basically, we’ll be in no better position than we are today.
Looks like I’ll just still continue to tell people not to use IE and to use Firefox or Safari … or even Opera instead.
To me it sounds as if the WaSP guys have been totally bought out by MS. Sure the MS developers are standards legends, but there is still no assurance from MS to support standards, and (after all this time) still no language from the WaSP MS Task Force supports that either.
So why is WaSP wasting it’s valuable time with a company that has absolutely no intention of supporting standards?
It’s becoming progressively clearer that MS recent efforts in the areas of standards compliance are there to mitigate the voices of angry detractors, and stymie the flow of users away from IE. Not actually to support standards.
I believe that MS will never support standards with their browser. Doing that would be hamstringing IE in the ‘battle against Google’ [thanks Sean].
So would the WaSP MS Task Force please stop wasting time with the MS team and get back to the standards support we all know and love which is loudly bagging the crap out of Microsoft and IE until they get completely on board.
@ Dallas: “To me it sounds as if the WaSP guys have been totally bought out by MS.”
Dallas, as a member of WaSP and someone who has been a vocal critic of the stagnation of IE6 (My own site offers an alternative version for -IE6), and as someone who has been party to the efforts of Molly, the MSTF and the IE7 developers, I find your accusations frankly insulting.
Whether or not Microsoft choose to adopt the standards war cry for ethical or business reasons is not a matter worth discussing. The fact that their browser will have ‘better’ support for standards and that their latest authoring tools are built around more meaningful markup and CSS is only a good thing. A good thing for us as designers and developers and a good thing for web users in general. The battle is far from won, not only with Microsoft (as Robert Scoble’s post today illustrates) but also with the other ’superpowers’ on the web (in this I class eBay and Amazon plus the torrent of newer, so-called Web 2.0 applications) that seem to see standards and accessibility as a ‘feature’ not yet implemented.
“So would the WaSP MS Task Force please stop wasting time with the MS team and get back to the standards support we all know and love which is loudly bagging the crap out of Microsoft and IE until they get completely on board.”
WaSP’s continuing remit is to work with software and other vendors and also with designers and developers to further promote standards. Excluding a particular vendor, any vendor goes against everything that WaSP has achieved since the very beginning.
@ Malarkey: “Whether or not Microsoft choose to adopt the standards war cry for ethical or business reasons is not a matter worth discussing.”
What the? Er… Isn’t WaSP about promoting web standards? How is it that working with the IE group means that suddenly whether MS choose to support them isn’t worth discussing?
Noooo, of course you guys haven’t been bought off.
@ Malarkey: “The fact that their browser will have ‘better’ support for standards and that their latest authoring tools are built around more meaningful markup and CSS is only a good thing.”
Yes I agree, and I look forward to the time when I don’t have to worry about box discrepancies while marking up (maybe 4 years from now). However, unless there is a pledge from MS to support standards outright, where are the web developers assurances that MS won’t continue to restrain web technologies in general to gain business advantages, like they have for the last 5 years?
It didn’t take WaSP to let the IE team know that web developers really want like :hover on any block element, or alpha in PNGs, because the web developer community as a whole already let them know those things.
And it’s not like the developers on the IE team don’t understand the importance of standards or what a good browser is. They have oodles of expertise on the team.
So if MS don’t adopt the full support for standards position, it’s unclear exactly what WaSP’s role at MS really is, which is why (and I am sorry for rubbing salt into the wound) it seems that WaSP (with regards to MS) is nothing more than a device that garners good PR for IE. All WaSP do is defend IE these days, and yet where are the web communities development assurances? We still have none.
As it’s known in Microsoft’s history they will never let that happend they always want ot be a leader and rule the market, ask Zeldman.
But any way this is not a reason to stop trying with Microsoft.
Just a note to Vitamin that reading this via the feed the interviewee is not stated.
I think some folks here may not understand how big businesses work.
I can state from personal experience that you need to put considerable effort into bringing big businesses into your team first, and then (only then) you can begin the process of change.
This goes for more than just web standards in browsers. A techie needs to first be able to speak non-techie language before providing software/hardware support. A teacher needs to be able to explain complex processes in simple terms before being able to teach. A graphic designer needs to be able to sell his/her designs to the aesthetically-challenged. On and on and on.
The way WaSP will help with MS is by playing the game. This may not look good to non-corporate types, but that’s okay. The folks in the trenches already “get it.” However, the folks deciding what MS does with web standards are probably non-web folks. Speak W3C all you want to these guys and it won’t make a bit of difference. Speak their language, get chummy with them, and you’ll be surprised by how far the discussion can go.
Just my $0.02.
@ erat “Speak their language, get chummy with them, and you’ll be surprised by how far the discussion can go.”
What your saying is that, greasing the palms, pressing the flesh - basically kissing up to Microsoft will lead to them radically changing their corporate attitude, the fabric of their heavily embedded, deeply integrated and bundled corporate attitude, putting the importance of standards before the importance of market share, right?
I can just imagine, Scoble IMs Bill and says, “We have discussed it with the Standards crowd, and we think supporting standards is a great way to go for Microsoft!”
Bill replies, “Hey yeah wow! Great idea! Why didn’t we think of that before? That would be neat!” (calling Steve over) “Bams! Mate! You’ll never guess what Scobes just suggested”
Ballmer, smiling in a gentle patriarchal way, “What did crazy old Scobes come up with today?” Chuckling, “That Scobes, he’s worth his weight in gold isn’t he.”
Bill looks up at Steve with a triumphant expression on his face, “One word - OpenStandards”.
At first Steve looks a little confused, but his facial expression changes to ebullience when the idea sinks in. “Oh my God! That’s brilliant!” Turning to the door, “Jennifer! Send Scobles wife a ham!”
Bill leans back in his chair, hands cupping the back of his head, “You know Bams, I think it’s memo-o’clock.”
The majority of users in the world use IE. Some people would argue that we should be standardizing around Microsoft.
So we have to change their mindsets…. most people who use the internet can’t and won’t download a new Browser., ( my grandma and parents ) so Just saying Browse Happy isnt enough,The push to switch browsers has been for security reasons,and thats a good reason (Thats why I started using Firefox). but its not working fast enough. I think the designing people here and elsewhere need to give my grandma a reason to stop using IE ( BESIDE SECURITY ) to start making a bigger dent in IE market share..
We should definitely not be standardizing around Microsoft not only for the reasons you mentioned but also because the rendering engine sucks.
I have not been impressed with IE7 thus far and I do not envision ever switching, even if they do go standard.
And, whose to say that 80% of the 90% IE user base will even get the update?
The question is how do you get mainstream to adopt a new browser? If you can answer that than you are a genius. You have solved an eternal problem of product management.
I think it has to be a social movement, not a technological one. Tell your parents and grandparents. They ask you what computer to buy … tell them what browser to use.
Question: What’s in it for MS?
MS is a business with a model that wants to keep everything in the MS family.
It is in their interests, as software vendors, to impart a reliance on their products. They want everyone to use MS software for everything they might ever want to do. It’s their plan, their goal, to tie everything up so it can be integrated with the OS. It’s convergence.
Now, where is the sense in them suddenly changing tac and creating software that is the same as everyone else. Where has their USP gone? Where has their potential for innovation (withiin their own framework) gone?
With enough pressure they may bend, but I’ll warrant it will be with a bitter taste in his mouth that Bill finally gives the “go” to making a fully standards compliant browser. It’s just not in his interest and doesn’t fit with the MS business model.
Well another idea is to get the Big Pc makers liek Dell to put ” the other browsers on the Desktop.. If it’s there, People will use it. Or has MS put so much money and pressure on the “Dells” not to ?
@ Dallas,
“What the? Er… Isn’t WaSP about promoting web standards? How is it that working with the IE group means that suddenly whether MS choose to support them isn’t worth discussing?”
Please re-read what I wrote. I said that “Whether or not Microsoft choose to adopt the standards war cry for ethical or business reasons is not a matter worth discussing.”
This means that the reasons for their decision are unimportant in my view, not the end result and not that whether MS choose to support them isn’t worth discussing.
“Noooo, of course you guys haven’t been bought off.”
Personally recieved from Microsoft
One Internet Explorer Seven t-shirt
One Windows Live t-shirt
One copy of Visual Studio for Mac (for testing IE7 builds)
Several stickers
Two pitchers of frozen margarita (shared :))
I guess I’ll be retiring on that little lot ;)
On a separate note (and not aimed at Dallas), I hope that whether or not readers agree with WaSP’s standpoint on Microsoft, whether or not readers agree with this article or like this site; please keep your comments professional.
Personal attacks on the author, publisher or other individuals are simply unnecessary.
Cheers for tolerance! Yay for moderation! I love IE! I love WaSP! Molly is the best! Zeldman rocks my world! Vitamins! ABC! DEK! Bollocks!
Daniel
I’m sorry, but if you can’t add anything intelligent to the conversation, then we’re going to delete your comments. Feel free to disagree, but we don’t tolerate disrespect.
A luta por Web Standards…
A luta pelas Web Standards será vencida?Uma entrevista com Molly Holzschlag publicada no Blog Vitamin
A luta pelas standards esta a pleno vapor. Será que agora que a Microsoft começa a falar sobre os padrões iremos ver uma luz no….
From a Microsoft web tools perspective, I see the relationship with the WASP members as a valuable resource to provide advocacy from a web designer and standards perspective. In the developer tools group, traditionally our relationship has been with developer customers, not web designers. Thus when it came to creating web tools, we approached them from that perspective. During the Visual Studio 2005 development, the relationship was forged with the WASP folks and others in the web designer community, and their influence caused to change priorities and focus on web standards. This affected the features we built and the way we designed them. Visual Studio 2005 was a step in the right direction, and we will be doing more in future versions.
A specific example was when we had to choose which doctype to use by default in our templates, we originally used xhtml 1.1, but were advised to change it to 1.0 Transitional, as not everyone is ready for strict yet.
Molly, Byron et al have been helpful in advocating what’s most important from the standards, and what’s going to have most impact for web designers / developers. The value in this relationship is that they are advocates for what they believe in, and give us honest advice and guidance, even if it’s contrary to what we were expecting/ wanted to hear.
If you think we could “buy” the WASP folks with a couple of starbucks and a T-shirt, then I don’t think you know them that well.
Getting community feedback has had a great impact on the way we develop software. In developer division we have been using the MSDN Feedback mechanism for bugs and feature suggestions, forums at www.asp.net and blogs such as Scott Guthrie’s to get customer feedback and apply it into the product and addons.
Sam
Malarkey – I think it was Virtual PC for the Mac you must have gotten. If it was Visual Studio, then I’d be surprised as its only a windows product.
[…] Microsoft, IE and the Web Standards Project There is a long thread over at thinkvitamin.com in the comments of an interview with Molly Holzschlag. I’ll avoid monologueing on whether one should consider web standards a battle or not, and just weigh in on the comments threads. Malarkey said “whether or not Microsoft chooses to adopt the standards war cry for ethical or business reasons is not a matter worth discussing.” Though this was misinterpreted by others in the comments and I applaud Malarkey’s Nietzsche-esque reasoning, I actually disagree. From ten years of experience in championing standards and web development inside Microsoft, I think it’s actually critically important that the reasons for supporting standards in our products – particularly IE – be business ones. Business reasons stand the test of time. Pure altruistic “ethical” reasons are hard to defend to shareholders. I personally believe there is a business case for implementing standards, and I consider it my job, among other things, to make that case internally. I found the idea of Molly, Malarkey and the Web Standards Project selling out first snortingly funny, and then fairly offensive. I would guess that anyone who has met Molly in person would know better than to think that she could be bought. Of course, anyone who knew me at all would understand the same, but I don’t expect many of you to understand that (though at least one does - thanks Jon). I’ll apologize in advance for some of my tone in this post; sooner or later, the frustration is bound to get to me. Understand that this post contains my personal opinions, and is neither the voice of Microsoft nor reviewed or approved by anyone I work for. I’ll take that opportunity to be a bit snarkier than I usually would be. Somehow, a lot of you seem to equate bitching and moaning with actually accomplishing something. Sad, really, because it’s the opposite of true. Justin Reese says, “I applaud the efforts of the WaSP, but since this alliance with MS, it seems that diplomacy has rendered their language somewhat impotent. If that’s what finally brought IE7 up to where it is now, I apologize and yay diplomacy. But otherwise, let’s kick some ass and get MS up to speed.” The Web Standards Project finally realized that working with Microsoft would probably be more productive if they worked with them rather than just sniping at them (which, by the way, is pretty effectively ignored). Congratulations, you too can change the world if you apply pressure in the right way. I applaud their change of tone, because it makes it a lot easier for me to apply their arguments as pressure internally; they’re obviously representing a real set of customers, and rationally thinking about the best things for those customers. I appreciate the hard work that Molly, Andy, DL and others have put in to represent web developers and work with us here at Microsoft to make the world better. Threads like this one infuriate me because they are doing the right thing for you, and you’re giving them guff. Dallas asks: “So why is WaSP wasting its valuable time with a company that has absolutely no intention of supporting standards?” Perhaps because your rhetoric is completely incorrect and misleading, and we DO have every intention of supporting standards, and have been proving that. I think IE7 makes a solid step in the right direction, and shows that we are investing there. We made NO proprietary additions to the platform, and spent all our time fixing standards bugs and implementing standards features in the platform, in IE7. If you are a great developer and want to help make the world better by implementing standards, fabulous - we’re still hiring. Drop me a line. Dallas also said “All WaSP do is defend IE these days, and yet where are the web communities development assurances? We still have none…” and “…unless there is a pledge from MS to support standards outright…” What pledge are you looking for, exactly? That we won’t implement anything that isn’t a W3C Recommendation? Huh, no one else has done that. That we will implement EVERYTHING that IS a W3C Recommendation? Well, no one else has done that either. (I seem to recall a CSS 2.0 challenge I made years ago that no one has collected on. The first full implementation of CSS 2.0 with no bugs I can find gets to collect. Note the laxity in definition of full and compliant.) That we will comply with standards? Well, I’m trying to, and random “acid tests” get publicized that aren’t compliance tests at all, but that’s how the community treats them – yet I’ll still maintain that fixing the three-pixel jog and overflow problems was a lot more important than adding data URL support in IE7. Sorry, that one just slipped out. Dallas, you also said “where are the web developers’ assurances that MS won’t continue to restrain web technologies in general to gain business advantages, like they have for the last 5 years?” - I can’t come up with any response to that asinine question that doesn’t include an obscenity. I tried a couple of times. Perhaps you should look back in your web history books into who shipped the first mass-market CSS implementation, and consider the full balance. Perhaps you should think about who invented the XMLHTTPRequest object. I’m sorry Microsoft took an apparent vacation for a few years. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. Go watch Bill Gates’ and Dean Hachamovitch’s keynote addresses from the MIX06 conference, maybe their apologies will mean more. You can continue to stew in that if you want. I’m not asking that people forget that vacation – I don’t expect them to. I’ve moved on, and I’m trying to do the right thing now. There’s a difference between stewing in the past, and figuring out where to go from here. Dallas: “It’s becoming progressively clearer that MS’s recent efforts in the areas of standards compliance are there to mitigate the voices of angry detractors, and stymie the flow of users away from IE. Not actually to support standards.” WHAT??!?!?!?!?!?! I translate this as “Microsoft is just supporting standards because that’s what people want. They’re not actually supporting standards.” HUH?!?!?!?!?!?!? Pete says, “Now, where is the sense in them suddenly changing tack and creating software that is the same as everyone else… Where has their potential for innovation (within their own framework) gone?” Are Opera, Safari and Mozilla exactly the same software? Do they innovate? Does the world not change, and should Microsoft not change with it? Pete says, “It’s [Microsoft’s] plan, their goal, to tie everything up so it can be integrated with the OS. It’s convergence.” I think the “OS” in that sentence is a red herring. Yes, I want everything to integrate together. I love mashups (I co-wrote an internal whitepaper on the topic with Scott Isaacs of Live fame last year). Doesn’t everyone want this level of integration? Your error is in not understanding that we get that not everything is Microsoft services, let alone software. Pete also says “[Microsoft] want[s] everyone to use MS software for everything they might ever want to do.” Well, duh – of course I’d PREFER you use Microsoft software (and services) rather than our competitors’ software or services. I’m a Microsoft shareholder. That doesn’t mean that I don’t understand some mashups are going to use Google Maps rather than Virtual Earth, or that I have any vested interest in making that any less easy. In fact, I think not enabling that integration would be irresponsible to our own shareholders (see “there is a business case for standards,” paragraph 2). Dallas also says “It didn’t take WaSP to let the IE team know that web developers really want like :hover on any block element, or alpha in PNGs, because the web developer community as a whole already let them know those things.” Quite right, it didn’t – but having the Web Standards Project act (in contrast to the past, I’d mention) as a rational representative of the web developer community that we can ask for advice has actually helped quite a bit in setting priorities. You know, priorities – those things you have to deal with when you can’t bend space and time and get everything you want, today. Again - we’re hiring. Justin Reese asks, “It doesn’t matter to me if every single member of the IE team is a standards-tooting W3C member; do those people have the power and freedom within MS to enact change? … Will MS allow IE7 to stagnate like IE6 did, or will they release point releases that improve the standards compliance like, well, every other browser maker does?” Yes, I have the power to enact change. Yes, I will continue to improve standards support and compliance in IE, and make the web better. That’s my job, my charter, my vision, and my passion. The day it isn’t, I’ll quit. The day the development of the standards-based platform in IE goes on a back burner again, I’ll quit. My management up to and including Bill Gates has said we are back in the saddle with IE, so I have a job to get back to. -Chris Wilson […]
Wow. I was planning to excerpt and track back to my post, but it already got embedded in toto.
At any rate, I responded to this thread on my own blog.
-Chris Wilson (the IE platform guy)
I’m one of those people who thinks that web standards should have aligned themselves more closely to IE’s vision of the internet. If they had, the single biggest frustration on the web (rendering content correctly across browsers) would be greatly diminished. This policy really makes sense when standardizing features that already exist in IE, but don’t exist in the standards. Why create a standard that you know will break the experience of the majority of users?
And, no, I don’t think IE should have conformed more closely to the standards. I like IE’s way of interpreting things. It’s *almost* always more intuitive than the standards/Firefox way of doing things. (Just Google for “div firefox column height”. Or consider specifying that an element is to be 100 pixels wide. What I mean by 100 pixels is 100 pixels. Not 100 pixels plus the padding, the border, etc.)
Ah, well. One can only wish.
@ Malarkey:
—
Personally recieved from Microsoft
One Internet Explorer Seven t-shirt
One Windows Live t-shirt
One copy of Visual Studio for Mac (for testing IE7 builds)
Several stickers
Two pitchers of frozen margarita (shared :))
—
So you admit it! We all knew it all along - it’s sooo obvious!
I can’t believe all they gave you was stinking merchandise. I mean, I could understand something like a ‘Millennium Falcon still in the box’ quelling the dissenting voice of the web community’s representatives, but t-shirts and stickers?
Well, while you’re swanning around with the likes of the IE team, not caring whether or not MS decide to support standards, everybody else that doesn’t get the t-shirts and the stickers and plied with liquor is still wishing MS would adopt standards.
Think about the implications for the industry at large. If IE got on board 5 years ago, the net would be phenomenal. If all browser makers could adopt standards - how great would it be? I always thought that is what WaSP is there for - to pursue the vision of a world where web developers are happy. How can we be happy if MS won’t promise that their browser won’t require extra mark up to display our layouts that we put our heart and sole into?
The problem of standards on the Internet is in someways comparable to the development of medicine and medical practice; Dallas is the classic angry relative of a patient, yelling at the doctor that is trying to help. Maybe Dallas will calm down and shake the doctor’s hand when he realises that things are being done to make things better.
When you have something like technology or medicine things continually change and people eventually learn from their mistakes and start to make improvements for the good of everybody but it is a messy and painful process that takes time so to some degree Dallas’s rant is understandable but it doesn’t mean the doctor should put with it because they (Chris Wilson) have feelings too.
WASP is like a patient support group with leaders and experts who can advise and converse with both patients and the medical profession. What good would a medical support group be if all it did were criticise and moan? That only frightens the people they are supposed to be supporting. They need to work with the doctors to let them know what patients’ want, need and like.
Sorry to labour that analogy but hopefully you get what I mean.
We all want the web to be perfect but with so many variables, interests and other things to consider that is going to be some way off (if ever) but with products like Firefox and IE7 they are a step in the right direction and that is much better than standing still and arguing with each other.
Cometh IE7, we will once more develop on real browsers (Gecko, KHTML, Opera) and then try to make IE look at least reasonably close.
Sigh.
I’m not sure I could handle IE actually rendering correctly the first try. It would scare and confuse me.
Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer Platform team at Microsoft proclaims in this responding post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/archive/2006/05/11/595536.aspx
to be “championing standards” and describes standards as “my vision, and my passion”.
I call bulls**t. Just try to validate his blog:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.msdn.com%2Fcwilso%2Farchive%2F2006%2F05%2F11%2F595536.aspx
Passion indeed.
Sean, just because Chris’s blog doesn’t validate, doesn’t mean Chris himself is insincere.
Chris uses the MSDN Blogs system. Neither he nor the IE Team made that system. It is an entirely different team of people that made the MSDN Blogs system and they are the ones responsible for the invalid use of markup on Chris’s blog. Chris is not responsible for any of that.
And no, I highly doubt that Chris had the freedom to take his official Microsoft blog to a personal site running Wordpress.
testing
hmmm
Updates should be instantly like firefox and opera: not when the next OS version gets shipped.
A task force is ok when it has the power to enforce standards on IE
It seems that my earlier comment was taken the wrong way.
After reading it back then perhaps this is understandable.
My question, “what’s in it for MS?” was meant to make people think a little about the bigger picture.
MS has, for many years, been working to make their products invaluable. They have gone to great lengths to make life easy and provide an all in one solution to the average person’s computing needs. By and large they have done a good job of it too. Sure, there are things that some people don’t like, but there are multitudes out there that rely on MS software each and every day and are quite happy with the situation.
We cannot expect an interest as large as Microsoft to suddenly change from proprietery integration to a completely open platform that is essentially the same as everyone else. The fact that they have done this should be appluaded. The fact that they still have a way to go is to be expected. There is no browser out there at the moment that is 100% as per the spec.
MS obviously realise the importance of web standards and people like Chris Wilson obviously want to build the better browser and there’s the crux - better for who? MS wants to please it’s customers, who by and large don’t care one jot about web standards, but at the same time they see the value in the standardised web.
To be sure that they are delivering the best possible product to their customers, MS are taking the time to ensure that the changes they make to IE are the right changes.
They are doing it folks. We just need to be patient.
Might I also add that the suggestion that WASP members have been “bought off” is, frankly, laughable.
“MS obviously realise the importance of web standards”
You’re going to have a big problem convincing a lot of people about that..
[…] Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer Platform team answers to Molly Holzschlag’s Interview at Vitamin Features. […]
I believe its a big mistake to keep calling this thing “standards.” Molly is correct when no one web browser can claim to be completely compliant.
What we are talking about is CSS-P (css - positioning) and DOM support.
To feign “standards” would be (and is in my view) counter productive. We can preach “standards” until we are blue in the face - but it wont change a thing until we call a duck a duck.
Will the Standards Battle Ever be Won?
Between browsers, between browsers and WWW, …
Standards evolve but oh so slow. I love WWW to have some more transparency too. It seems like som mysterious board full of Ewoks.
Standard users are never going to download new browsers themselves. Even when IE7 comes out (and I think it is a huge step forward) developers will still have to take account of users on older versions of IE and indeed other legacy browsers. I’d anticipate that for the next two years we will still have to hack around to get things working. IE 7 is a huge step in the right direction and Microsoft should be commended for their efforts. I think people forget that Microsoft is a commercial organisation and they don’t have to do any of this. They are listening and have responded to developers and that is a good thing. I still recommend Firefox though!
“You know what? I don’t see why one should promote ANY web browser. Isn’t good accessible content the important? I think we shouldn’t write content for specific browsers anyway. Write guided by the latest recommendations, then let people decide if they want to view it “broken” or like it was supposed to be.
Now this all talk about Internet Explorer lately seems a bit redundant to me, and in fact, this is what I object to with WaSP: The web is content not what we access it with. Content is what’s important, so focus on that because it’s hard enough and the rest will solve itself. Come on! - Who wouldn’t want their trademark (read browser) all over this gigantic world of information we use? Competition will progress browsers I assure you all.
My recipe: help people who want to broaden their spectrum of visitors directly - and through simplifying guides, hints and promoting (why not even contributing!) advancements in authoring tools. That’s all.
I’m off to fight this war with myself (the great hypocrite) now. Try your best, y’all. And take care. “
[…] In a recent interview, WaSP Group Lead Molly Holzschlag defended the developers in the trenches at Microsoft, fighting the hard fight to produce a standards-compliant browser in the face of the business realities at Microsoft: Hate Microsoft if you want, but please don’t ever think that the developers themselves are anything but our colleagues fighting the hardest fight of all. […]
[…] Will the Standards Battle ever be won? […]
[…] Think Vitamin: Will the Standards Battle Ever be Won? […]
[…] "Will the Standards Battle ever be won?":http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/the-battle-for-web-standards […]
Too little, too late! Microsoft is too damn cumbersome to back-track from their mistakes made years ago. It is obvious they made the distinct, greedy decision to go it their own way when developing IE.
Can we agree that, although development is going in the right direction now, it is frustrating to see the distance that still needs to be made up?
I have to say I wholeheartedly agree with Dallas and his/her comments on this issue. I have viewed the impartiality problem many times whilst working alongside “cause groups” when they start to move from the most humble of beginnings to becoming somewhat influential.
The view taken by Malarkey seems to be incredibly blindsided as I am sure he would notice in retrospect had he no specific interest in the subject matter. I mean no offense as I understand that when a corporation with the weight of Microsoft decide it is in their best interest to have certain community members “on-side” it is impossible to comprehend the strategies they may employ to appear to toe the line.
What is worth thinking about is this fact; if it is more efficient for Microsoft to appear to silence some small concerns and “buddy up” to some interest and action groups than to actually make the changes that it would need to do to be excluded from the scope of such action groups, then they’d do it. It is classic business bargining…would you trust PR from Microsoft themselves, or would you trust it from peers in your own community who may or may not have been somewhat wooed by merchandising and gentle coaxing?
It’s an age old tactic, it is very commonplace in any sort of business practice, and to ignore that it is happening is dangerously naive.
This entire interview seemed to scream of bias and frankly I would have expected no less considering the clout that WaSP now has in the industry. Just realise when you are truly being manipulated! Orwell’s Animal Farm comes to mind.
Dave…
Interesting topic… I’m working in this industry myself and I don’t agree about this in 100%, but I added your page to my bookmarks and hope to see more interesting articles in the future…
This blog posting was of great use in learning new information and also in exchanging our views. Thank you.
[…] And I don’t think the devout standardistas are asking for browsers to choke when they come across sites that don’t strictly adhere to the W3C’s recommendations. What they are looking for is that all browsers interpret valid code in strict accordance with the currently accepted standards. They can treat non-compliant code in whatever manner seems best to them. I have to admit, that would be enough to make me happy. Unfortunately it’s only realistic that economic concerns sometimes trump technically ideal software development. (That’s certainly how it works for my web sites, so I don’t see why browser development would be any different.) The standards battle may never be “won”. […]
It’s fun to me how you let the spam be, Ryan Carson, while you moderated my thoughts. Perhaps you like spam better since you’re only in this game for the money as well?
[…] Vitamīnā bija nopublicēts rakstiņš par Web standartiem un to kā IE7 tos atbalstīs. Rakstiņš izraisīja lielu troksni komentāros - kā jau vienmēr, kad runa ir standartiem un Microsoft produktiem. Uz šo rakstu ir saņemta atbilde kādā no Microsoft darbinieku blogiem. Īpaši man patika tā daļa, kuru es atļāvos izcelt šajā rindkopā. From ten years of experience in championing standards and web development inside Microsoft, I think it’s actually critically important that the reasons for supporting standards in our products – particularly IE – be business ones. Business reasons stand the test of time. Pure altruistic “ethical” reasons are hard to defend to shareholders. I personally believe there is a business case for implementing standards, and I consider it my job, among other things, to make that case internally. […]
[…] L’articolo in questione lo trovate qui. […]
[…] Molly Holzschlag talks about the future of web standards at Vitamin. It’s a must read. […]
Ie6 Ie7, firefox . . .opera . . . safari oh man I can’t get my head straight. I really could go for some better standards. Also could go with javascript going the way of the dinosaur
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Look this site
http://www.ooYes.net
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[…] Molly E Holzschlag talks about her battle for web standards, Microsoft and the WASP task force. Great!read more | digg story […]
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[…] Molly E Holzschlag talks about her battle for web standards, Microsoft and the WASP task force. Great!read more | digg story […]
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