Uh Oh… here comes another Flame War!!!

Last week Vitamin posted an feature with Molly Holzschlag entitled "Will the Standards Battle Ever be Won?" in which she answers some of the burning questions surronding Internet Explorer's standards support. In the comments for this article, some are pretty scathing of Microsoft and this has been met with a, slightly less than refrained, response from Chris Wilson, the Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer Platform team at Microsoft… and to be fair, I can't really blame him.

It nice to actually hear the "Other" side of this argument, although I hate to admit that's probably exactly what the response to Chris's post will be (and some of the comments thus far would indicate just that)… There is, it seems, a community within the community (our community), and I've been guilty myself in the past, that simply put will never accept Microsoft as anything but the anti-christ of anything they do, particulary on the web front.

But I for one applaude Microsoft for addressing the issues and making a valient attempt to move forward (or should that be "catch up"?… sorry, couldn't help it, that one just slipped out and I look forward to IE7, although I'm sure in the short term it will make life harder. While I agree, we do spend a lot of our time addressing issues within IE, we should not forget that IE has, in the past, facilitated a considerable amount of forward momentum in the web arena without which we may very well not be where we are today… and for that perhaps we should forgive their error in judgement, taking the extended holiday that was/is IE 6.

Enough with the bitter rhetoric… they have acknowledged they made a mistake and action is being taken… it's time to move on!