We were discussing standards and what they mean on one of GranneDev, my listserv for Web developers, and one of my former students made the following argument: "Love MS or Hate them, when you have 90% of the market, I'd say MS decides the standards and the rest of the world follows."

My response:

I disagree. Standards are just that ... standards set by a standards body. You either follow them or you don't follow them. Even MSFT cannot redefine what "standards" mean.

I don't give a tinker's damn (man, I love saying that!) whether they're 90% or 10% or 99.99% -- if a browser implements something that's not standards-based, DON'T USE THAT FEATURE. If we don't support standards, then we've got the same mess that developers had a few years ago - coding two entirely different sites because Netscape 4 & IE 4 supported different versions of HTML, Javascript, & the DOM. That sucked for developers, it sucked for customers & clients, & it sucked for users.

We CANNOT go down that path again. Mozilla (and therefore Netscape) is incredibly standards compliant, and IE 5 is good. Let's see how good IE 6 is.

Note: After writing this message, IE 6 came out, and I'm happy to say that it seems to be quite standards compliant. There are a few glitches, but on the whole, things look better.