Starting this blog was an opportunity for me to learn more about web design and web technologies. And the move to Wordpress was a good time for me to refresh the site design. But before putting everything online I wanted a little placeholder page announcing what’s going on. So, I opened up my text editor and wrote few lines of HTML and CSS, a very simple thing. It works fine under Safari until I tried it on Internet Explorer. Actually, I’ve just experienced one of the most frustrating thing in web design: dealing with browser incompatibilities and standards–especially IE.

The HTML 4.0 and CSS 2 specification exists for about 8 years and what did Microsoft during all this time? Nothing. That’s so sad. Dealing with these differences is a real waste of time and energy. The Internet is something rare these days and it should be protected. Governments and people shouldn’t let companies slowing down the innovation and adoption of these standards, that’s the foundation for the future of the web.

It’s still a sad reality that software implementations of standards are generally lead by politics. I still wonder how the foundation of the Internet have managed to take over. TCP/IP and HTTP are maybe the only standards we can rely on and that’s really a miracle. Remember, years ago, Microsoft wanted to launch its own Internet. Thanks god, it didn’t happen.

Microsoft is still frightened about application done through the web and Google just show that’s possible to make something useful to people… and free. Windows Vista will bring its set of incompatible technologies and Internet Explorer 7 is said not to implement the full CSS 2 standard.

A neverending story…