waffle

It is heartening to watch Microsoft cave in to public pressure and at least be able to give the impression of realizing how important consistent support for web standards are.

Original intent or not, a version of Internet Explorer that is significantly better at parsing and rendering and that opts to flex these muscles by default rather than by obscure explicit opt-in will be one of the biggest boons to modern web standards in a long time.

Now let’s just hope that standards support won’t take a back-seat to Silverlight support at the nearest opportunity (that sort of focus change won’t come with a weblog post and a press release). Silverlight might be cross-browser, cross-platform and slightly more open, but it’s still poised to become the new ActiveX, and I’d rather they’d spend the energy actually implementing new standards support and participating in the standards discussion instead of obstructing it.