opera -- was: Re: downloading

[bof]

Joel Hammer wrote:

>IIE is the most compliant browser around, AFAIK. I think that MS is playing the game smart. They are pushing ahead and
>rapidly complying with the new standards coming from the W3C people before the others have time to do it. But, much more commonly, sites check for IIE and netscape and adjust accordingly. NOBODY (almost) checks for opera.
>


I'm curious as to the source of the information in the statement the IE 
is the most compliant browser: was it by some chance a MS press release? <g>

 From everything I've read IE is one of the least standard compliant 
browsers, because MS chooses, as so often with their products, to 
attempt to define their own practices as the standard, ignoring the rest 
of the world, and particularly the W3C people, knowing that many 
developers will follow them because they are MS. This is not, as far as 
I am concerned, playing it smart: it's simply MS playing MS and thumbing 
their nose at the rest of the known universe using a business model of 
trying to make MS's proprietary practices the standard.

The reason that so many sites accept it in lieu of other browsers seems 
to be because so many website developers are lazy and use MS tools to 
write their pages --- so naturally the site will work fine with IE. They 
simply don't take the time and effort to write good HTML code and check 
their pages against any standards at all.

OTOH, from everything that I have read, in this list and others, Mozilla 
1.0 is probably the most standard compliant of the current crop of 
browsers, with Opera just behind it.