How hard must it be?

[sharkey]

<rant>I was thinking hard to myself the other day which is quite hard for me these days how hard it must be to create a browser which is fully standards compliant. Why cant IE in the next release at least make their browser fully standards compliant and if CSS3 has been released by then fully support that too. This would make many developers lives much easier. I myself have never created a web browser of any sort so i dont know the difficulty in creating one but it cant be that hard to support these tags and elements instead of me creating stupid ineffiecient work arounds all the time for my CSS layouts.</rant>

Sorry about the <rant> but i had to get it out some how eh:D and was wondering if anybody has created a small browser before and knows how hard it is to support elements.

[CardboardHammer]

Given their market share, it's in their better interest to NOT support standards. Perhaps the courts could be used to convince them otherwise, but who will put up the kind of money it would take?

[akadis]

maybe just ignorance, but i dont understand how could it be in their interest not to support standards?

[sharkey]

Yeah good points i reckon its mainly lazyness and them rushing so they can compete with releases from other main browsers.

[Daniel T]

Originally posted by akadis
how could it be in their interest not to support standards?
Why take the time to do it right when you can do it wrong and get away with it? :rolleyes:

[CardboardHammer]

Originally posted by akadis
maybe just ignorance, but i dont understand how could it be in their interest not to support standards?

Because non-compliance sandbags competing browsers that don't render non-compliant pages the same way IE does. Add to that their web development tools that generate output that isn't standards compliant and it presents a significant impediment to competitors. (Who is the typical enduser going to blame for the rendering difference?)

If their browser marketshare wasn't so huge to start with, it wouldn't be possible for them to get away with it, but it is and it is.

[Aronya1]

Support standards-compliant code...
Support non-standards-compliant code...

Are the two mutually exclusive?