It's a familiar scenario. A new version of a Web browser is released, and while it has all the expected improvements and updates to existing features like HTML, CSS, and other open standards, it also has a number of new, and wholly proprietary, features: previously unknown style properties or HTML-like tags, even entirely new technologies undescribed in any specification.
To the untrained eye, these puzzling additions are viewed as an
unnecessary and irritating detour. Once again, the browser company has
zipped off into the weeds, totally ignoring standards in an attempt to
develop the next "killer app" to take over the Web and crush the
competition. And before the end of the first day of a browser's release,
cries of outrage echo through the Web community.
Why, people complain, do browser companies continue to forge blindly
ahead with more and more new features when they haven't even implemented
existing standards correctly? For example, both Microsoft and Netscape are
promising support for CSS2 when they haven't even gotten CSS1 right.
Both companies also claim they'll offer full
support for XML, yet they don't even have matching HTML parsers (depending on who you ask, they may not even have HTML parsers at all).
What's the deal? Why can't these bozos follow the standards process? What
do they think it's there for, anyway?
These complaints have prompted a major grassroots
campaign, the Web Standards
Project (WSP), formed for the sole purpose of demanding standards
compliance in all Web browsers. But, as with many aspects of life, things
aren't as simple as they first appear.
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