By Dan Rouse

A long, yet interesting and entertaining, article on the past, present and future of web standards. If you spend a large part of your day cursing one web browser or another, you should get a kick out of this.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

The article goes over the long running struggle facing the Internet Explorer developers regarding web standards, especially now with the upcoming release of IE 8. Being one of the first major browsers to gain wide acceptance, many websites were built and tested on early versions of IE. These early versions were forgiving when it came to following the rules in terms of coding the site. In addition, along the way different bugs would crop up that people would simply “code around” to make things work. Now that there is a push for web standards, the IE 8 team must choose their path. Down one path they conform to these standards strictly as many other competing browsers are now doing. Unfortunately, this will result in many websites (even big names like HP according to the article) not working correctly anymore because so many old sites relied on the quirky way IE worked. The other path is either ignoring the standards or trying to balance between them and the old ways.