Mozilla

Archive for April 9th, 2009

“IE must comply with web standards.” (Opera has suggested that Microsoft must support web standards they have promised to support).

April 9th, 2009

This potential principle has received the most criticism from the Mozilla community to date; there appears to be little support for this principle as a basis from legal requirements from the EC.  This is quite different from agreeing that:

  • Microsoft *should* implement critical web standards; and that
  • the web has been, and continues to be, held back by the lack of good standards support in IE.

In fact, the ongoing drag on the web’s functionality caused by IE’s limitations remains an enormous problem.  We agree on the problem.

The concern is that regulating compliance with standards is fraught with negative side effects and it’s hard to see how to avoid them.  To start with, the standards in question would need to be identified.  Opera points out that Microsoft has itself identified some standards but having Microsoft determine the standards doesn’t serve as a long term solution.  Second, this principle would put enormous stress on the standards-setting process.  This process is difficult in any case, with a variety of different players trying to agree on technical direction and specification.  If Microsoft is legally required to implement a specification, then it is hard to see the process ever coming to a conclusion.  Third, there is the question of how one determines compliance with a standard.  Implementations almost always have bugs, some are serious, some are in the nature of the process.  Someone would need to test and evaluate.  Setting that up is complex and may well be a bad precedent.

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