Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Imagine, if you will, that you were in the position of being able to have a list of all the things you wanted to change, or have a darned good go at changing, at the world’s largest software company. Think of all the annoyances you may have with that company’s software – what would you like to have put right?

Well, there are no guarantees that you’ll get your way in this respect, but as regular followers of this blog – and the world of web standards in general – you will probably know tha long-time WaSP lead Molly Holzschlag is off to work with Microsoft. Having done wonders in getting the company to make some big changes with IE (not alone, it has to be said, but certainly an instrumental part), Molly is hoping to walk in to the office on Monday with a list of to-dos, or to-look-intos. OK, it’s almost Monday for most people, but I’m sure that a day or two late won’t matter now, so head on over to Molly’s site and have your say. You have a direct line, so try to make the most of it folks.

Your Replies

#1 On March 19th, 2007 2:53 am Richard Conyard replied:

An overview of contentEditable controls such that they automatically validate to the given (x)HTML doctype without WYSIWYG editor authors having to write additional cleaning code, including stripping 3rd party namespaces as appropriate.

#2 On March 19th, 2007 4:28 am AlastairC replied:

I second Richard’s suggestion (especially if it gets the other browsers to pay attention), and add good default output for .Net and Sharepoint.

#3 On March 19th, 2007 5:33 pm Andre replied:

what is for you a good default output for .Net Alastair?

#4 On March 19th, 2007 6:35 pm AlastairC replied:

Hi Andre: Separation of style & content via CSS, and default components to match. I know it’s possible (if you don’t use the defaults), but so many sites/applications get churned out with very poor code, especially Sharepoint sites.

It’s a great toolset to have from a developer’s point of view, but it doesn’t encourage proper use of front-end code. Not that it has to, but since it doesn’t, the defaults need to be much better.

I had missed the last bit of the post about going to Molly’s site though :-/

#5 On March 20th, 2007 3:04 am Fredrik replied:

This is a no-brainer: support for application/xhtml+xml in Internet Explorer. I know Microsoft has ditched this one for IE 7 as well, and the claimed to have some sort of reason.

But the Microsoft-way of serving XHTML with XML namespaces is to serve it as XML. And if we go about it that way, XHTML is serving no purpose at all. Then it’s either HTML or XHTML. SGML or XML.

If Microsoft were to add application/xhtml+xml support we would acctually be able to use XHTML for it’s benefits, rather than (not) using it because all we are serving it up as HTML 4.01. Since SGML isn’t an inferior standard, nothings bad wrong with that, but there’s still no true XHTML. All because of IE.

I regard this as highly important, so far I’m sticking with HTML 4.01 because I really don’t see a reason for XHTML … at all. I keep my HTML 4.01 just as wellformed and use my own naming conventions: only lowercase (xhtml-style). If I want to go XHTML I can, but since it’s still just HTML I don’t.

#6 On April 7th, 2007 9:47 am Jan Riebold (Berlin) replied:

Market leader’s responsibility

Imagine you buy an electronic-newspaper for your company. In the morning you may want to read it on your windows office desktop pc.

Later at lunch time outside your office you might want to look at some articles of the same newspaper on your mobile phone or your pda – it still looks good and you enjoy your readings.

In the evening your tired of reading at a computer screen and you decide to print an interesting article to read it on your sofa. It still looks good and you enjoy reading the printed version.

Later your boss calls you and asks you for a certian article of the same newspaper. He has a mac with a safari browser, but it doesn’t matter; he also can read the information he needs and it looks good.

Would that not be great if “information is independently accessible” no matter what browser or “technical output device” is in use? The only way to achieve this goal are web standard.

As the market leader for browsers Microsoft has a social responsibility for maintaining and supporting the growth of the internet which is also becoming a part of business and economic growth in many countries more and more. The only way to ensure that as many people as possible can share information are standards. To ensure that people all over the world can share information “independently” is the central point of developing futher internet business.

Please excuse my mistakes in English, but I’m from Germany.

#7 On June 8th, 2007 6:46 am Joe replied:

Well, why should Microsoft have social responsibility ??

#8 On June 13th, 2007 7:59 am Stephen Brcic replied:

“Why should Microsoft have a social responsibility”!? I think the answer is quite obvious: a) most computer users are “force fed” into consuming Microsoft products, leaving only rare individuals who have never ever bought a microsoft product b) knowledge is power, and both knowledge and power ought to conjure up atleast some kind of sense of responsibility towards the community. That is, Microsoft has such a huge impact on the way we live, work and play (through its immense impact on technology), that it cannot ignore its responsibility towards how its products will work and affect society, and that’s the bottom line. Regards from a bloke from downunder who lives up top!

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