When Good Browsers Go Bad -- And They All Do

Jeffrey Zeldman must have thought he'd never live to see the day. Ten years after he co-founded the Web Standards Project, all of the major browser vendors have renewed their commitment to supporting World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards in the past few years -- and they're following through. The specifications in the latest standards initiatives are tighter than ever. Web authoring tools are generating more-compliant code. Two of the three rendering engines that underpin the major browsers in use today are open source.

And for the first time ever, the latest version of Microsoft Corp.'s browser, Internet Explorer 8, operates strictly in standards-compliant mode by default. In other words, it will support the W3C standards before it provides backward compatibility with nonstandard coding methods supported by Microsoft's previous browsers.

Those who lived through the browser wars of the '90s might think that hell has frozen over, were it not for one small problem: Users still experience plenty of problems on the Web. A recent report issued by browser vendor Opera Software ASA showed that the average page on the Web strays from WC3 page-markup specifications 47 times. Overall, just 4.13% of the 3.5 million Web pages Opera searched were fully standards-compliant when tested against the W3C validation suite.

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