Microsoft and Web Standards

It seems that these two have finally met face to face. For years (as any web developper will tell you) Internet Explorer's lack of standards compliance has been infuriating, mainly because it has its sneaky little ways of doing some things, and also becasue it does some things blatently incorrectly. However I think with version 7 this is all about to change.

Now, not having had more than a brief look at IE7 whilst playing with a Vista Beta box, I can't confirm how any pages render, but what I can do is tell you why I think Microsoft has finally got serious about web standards. I have recently been doing some development work using Visual Studio 2005, and since it's going to be around when Vista comes in (hopefully it will be widely used by then), it has got me thinking about some things that will be being released as part of dirty 'ole Windows Vista, primarily IE7.

You see, I was playing with some html code given to me by someone at work, for the purposes of fitting the web-application that I am designing into the corporate intranet template. And lo and behold, Visual Studio refuses to build the project until I make the code validate as xhtml 1.0 Transitional. Whilst I found this incredibly infuriating at the time (and really, compulsory validation is a pain because lets face it, sometimes you just want to get the job done and not worry about code that you have been given by a company who you have four days left with), but actually it is a very good sign. Sure it's only version 1.0, but hey, it is a definite indicator that Microsoft has finally jumped onto the standards band-wagon, and if their developer tools demand your code to validate, I think their browser might just comply to the standard, well here's to hoping!

Well done Microsoft!