That article claims that while Joel might live in MS centric micro-universe, a lot users out there never actually touch that damn browser. My whole family is IE free, and most of my co-workers have been trained in proper browsing protocols. Once you show them the spell-check feature and enable sessions they never want to switch back.

So while Joel thinks that there is only one true platform out there, there are in fact two. And Microsoft is posed to loose it’s position as a major platform if they don’t fix their browsers. Already most of web developers code to standards and then introduce “legacy hacks” so that it work on IE7 and IE6.

@Douglas - here is the thing though - 8 million pages would not be broken. I would suspect that only 20-30% of pages that could break would actually remain broken at the launch date. Any competent web designer, and any company that cares about their customers would fix these issues ahead of time. I mean it’s not like MS is not putting beta versions out there that could be used by developers to test their pages.

Hmm, and what the hell am I doing speaking English just because other people do it. Screw the dictionary. I’m going to use letters and words the way I want! Aoidsf8& 7w fsdkhf-(SD hfiwh7 BSDf lamf0f3w24 rnfsd 7ghdfg 34qngekjngl;0 a92i3094 nfjgh h96hg fswlsp487t!!@?

My thoughts exactly. If you don’t believe in web standards, why use any standards at all. Why not complain that when you plug you toaster into your TV, your web page doesn’t load properly. (It’s probably one of those evil Linux toasters anyway)

My person favorite was “8 billion existing web pages be damned.” Apparently IE8 is going to fail on “8 billion” pages if we don’t let Microsoft rule our lives. The part left unsaid was that instead, we should add “Yo! I’m tested with IE 8!” tags to all 8 billion pages. That sounds reasonable… doesn’t it?

34qngekjngl;0 a92i3094 nfjgh h96hg!

Web developers understand the importance of standards, most people outside the web world DO NOT AND NEVER will understand the pain that the lack standards present. Troll bait of not, Spolsky needs a reality check, and web developers need action, not rants on how standards are broken, or who said what about standards.

Speaking of which, I love how Spolksy rags on standards for 10 pages but on the other hand he actually hired Dave Shea to design the UI for his company’s website and products to make sure they are designed with accordance to these very same “standards” he dislakes so much.

Instead of having a standard that developers strive for, we should definitely have each company come up with its own interpretation of how a user would want any piece of information displayed. We could all have 50 browsers installed as end users so that we can just switch to the ones we want. That’s way better than having developers do it for us with just a few browsers since the non-Trident browsers are pretty damned good at displaying things in a similar manner; why would developers want to test in order to conform to some difficult standard that we might call a “goal.” Goals are stupid! When you’re down by two points at the end of a basketball game, don’t bother trying to throw the ball in, just accept that you probably won’t make it and give up. The Internet was way better when no one followed any specs and just threw elements all over the place and IE and Netscape were creating proprietary methods of doing things in order to vie for end users and “98%” of the world started using IE and all ended up with spyware.

BTW, Joel, a “mortal designer who attaches a DOCTYPE to [his/her] web page” is actually saying, “I did my best to conform to X standard. Render my page as closely to that standard as you can.” No wait, what the hell am I thinking? Let’s also ditch headers that define content types and we can all disagree on whether 0 means true or false and perhaps we can get rid of any fuel standards for our cars so yours can be powered by gas and mine will be powered by oranges–but only Florida oranges, because the others aren’t up to the “non-spec” of Florida oranges.

Hmm, and what the hell am I doing speaking English just because other people do it. Screw the dictionary. I’m going to use letters and words the way I want! Aoidsf8& 7w fsdkhf-(SD hfiwh7 BSDf lamf0f3w24 rnfsd 7ghdfg 34qngekjngl;0 a92i3094 nfjgh h96hg fswlsp487t!!@?