Joel Spolsky’s long, entertaining, entirely geeky take on web standards as “Martian Headsets” is definitely worth reading. He explains why the evolution of the web has included variations on and departures from standard ways of doing things, and cascading fault-tolerance has created a complex environment with billions of web pages, many filled with errors if your compare them to a supposed standard, though what’s “standard” is hard to pin down. The various browsers interpret the code for web pages differently, and this problem grows worse as the ecology grows more complex. It’s increasingly difficult, even writing straightforward html code, to create a page that displays correctly for all browsers. There’s also quite a bit in this article about the evolution of the Windows operating system and why Vista appears so broken. Then there’s IE8, currently in beta, subject to a struggle between standards idealists and pragmatists. Should IE be backward compatible if that means fault tolerant? Or should it adhere strictly to standards?
The precise problem here is that you’re pretending that there’s one standard, but since nobody has a way to test against the standard, it’s not a real standard: it’s a platonic ideal and a set of misinterpretations, and therefore the standard is not serving the desired goal of reducing the test matrix in a MANY-MANY market.
It’s gonna be a long, long year.
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A friend sent this link over with the subject line, “The world edges closer to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”