molly.com
Saturday 17 March 2007
Redmond, Here I Am
So things haven’t been so clear with Microsoft, and my relationship with Microsoft. Many readers are well aware that a few months ago I’d been offered a consultancy with them. Yet, I feel we are all sorts of not on track.
For that reason, I’m now here in Bellevue and on my way to Redmond first thing Monday morning to sort it all out.
Okay, so here’s the thing. I’ve got a contract to consult with Microsoft and do the best I can to represent standards and interoperability.
What would you like to see me do here?
- Work for IE.next compatibility
- Train internal Microsoft folks on standards
- Travel around and evangelize standards and interop
- Write and edit more materials about standards
Your answer is going to count big-time as I move forward. So shout it out, please. Let Microsoft know who they have and why, okay? I want to do right by interop and standards. I always have and probably always shall. So shout it out with me, okay? What do YOU want? How can I best serve our community whilst here?
Filed under: faith(less), standards, software, web design and development, travel, WaSP, w3c, browsers, microsoft, ie7, The Daily Molly
Posted by: Molly | 11:41 pm |
March 17th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
Evenagelize standards to the Microsoft folks and if enough of them get it, train ‘em. Particularly the folks behind Office, Windows Mobile and .net.
March 18th, 2007 at 12:00 am
I’m in full agrement with Nick. This is where we need to start making more inroads in getting standards thought of throughout all of MS, because to be honest it feel like the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
March 18th, 2007 at 12:09 am
I’ll second Nick, #3 will cover all 4! Mostly. Can IE8 bridge the difference better?
Whats the solution for all those that are on IE6 and stuck because someone gave them a PC with hacked OS, these people are locked out from downloading IE7, is there any solution for that?
March 18th, 2007 at 12:30 am
There are some core people, the IE team, Outlook team and any other teams working with the web, that need to understand web standards. If these core people are behind, then I’d focus on training them and getting some information in writing to help them train new members as they’re hired.
If you’d like a partner in crime for writing materials, I’ve been working with engineers at companies in NH to help them unlearn 1997 HTML practices and adopt standards. I’d be happy to share any class collateral I come up with.
Once you feel that there is a base of standards-competent developers, I would say it’s time to move on to IE.next.
Evangelizing standards on a large scale might be a bit of a dead end. I would focus on converting the key developers and attempt to get them to evangelize for you.
March 18th, 2007 at 12:46 am
I think the current IE team is pretty darn up to date on standards.
I’d make a poster of places that IE sucks, stick that in the hallway next to Dean Hachamovitch’s office (he’s the guy who runs IE team) and see just how many things get improved in IE8. Chris Wilson is your best friend. He is probably looking for specific help.
Try to find a way to build a bridge between Firefox, Opera, and IE teams so that future stuff all gets implemented the same way.
Most Web designers still aren’t doing the right thing for Mobile. Go and see the Windows Mobile group and get to know the folks building that browser.
Get to know the folks building stuff over on Live.com — they can hose a standards effort more than anyone. Daunting task.
You already know the folks on the Visual Studio team who implement Web tools (Scott Guthrie, et al). Keep on them to stay up to date too.
Just remember, you won’t get one big win. But lots of little ones. It’s a game of inches. It’s a frustrating game a lot of times. Don’t let it get you down. Just keep on the horse!
Thanks for what you’re doing, it’ll make all of our lives better!
Oh, and remember to keep your skills up too and look for the small things that’ll turn to be big in two years. Microformats, offline “Rich Internet Apps,” etc.
March 18th, 2007 at 12:49 am
I’m with Ian. Train folks there on standards, which will hopefully head-off standards SNAFUs at the pass for future products. Without knowing why IE has been behind the curve on standards it’s hard to say where to go on that. If it’s understanding, training will hopefully nip that one. If it’s a feature prioritization issue, help them understand that standards need to be a priority.
I think that right now you are in a position to make major ground for web standards, so in my mind that’s what you need to focus on. There are a number of developers, designers, assorted web-heads, and uncredentialed college students (*waves*) pushing for change from the outside. You, as a standards specialist working with Microsoft, are in a unique position and you need to do what good you can there, because nobody else can. It’s the principle of comparative advantage.
March 18th, 2007 at 12:58 am
Here are a few useful things off the top of my head:
* Get to someone in the .NET department and force them to a) fix their crap generated content (dealing with that *yet again* on another huge project, it’s pitiful), and b) quit requiring a form wrapper around the entire page
* ditto on Scoble’s comment about bridging the gap between development teams of various browsers. This comes back to your last Q&A post: the baseline needs to be the same, and Microsoft (with your help) can make waves in the right direction.
* don’t worry about the departments that already “get it” (e.g. the IE team), just focus on anyone inside who doesn’t understand the value of doing things the right way. If that involves workshops or speaking internally, cool. If it requires a written mandate that things will no longer be anything but perfect, that’s cool too.
Your time should be spent making sure that those who *don’t* get the concepts are educated, and that those who *do* get “it” are properly supported by everyone around them.
March 18th, 2007 at 1:03 am
Yeap it’s evangelize, agree with Nick.
But really ensure that the separate teams get the problems and the solutions that standards offer. As you know they don’t appear to talk to each other that much and are suffering from big corporation syndrome of encapsulated highly-political teams with totally separate agendas. If you can make them understand from their different view points them so much the better.
You may need to micro educate from time to time on the evangelistic road. As I suspect some of the practices are very well entrenched and an evangelistic approach will just cause their eyes to glaze over.
March 18th, 2007 at 1:06 am
@Robert it’s not the IE team that’s the problem, its the other apps that have influence on the web/internet and as MS embraced a overall web/internet integration a while back they have yet to uniformly adopt a across the board level of standards.
March 18th, 2007 at 1:09 am
Hi Molly,
Noticed it got a bit quiet about that standards thing with Microsoft. I wonder why there was no action on their side?
Anyway, i would say that training is important, but first people there need to get a total grasp about what it is that should be understood about standards and why they are important. They should realize, that apprehending to standards with their big global marketing position can make advancing standards very fast and also put Microsoft on a track, so that a majority of people might think better of them, since it seems that they start to care even more about this direction, than they already do in some parts.
March 18th, 2007 at 1:19 am
Molly,
Be upfront, raw and passionate about the whole picture. Tell us what we suck at, what we could do better and more importantly followup post your meeting with the MS Team(s).
(I’ve thrown my wish-list to a few folks at HQ around IE8 heh so, like Scoble stated, we aren’t all in the dark at MS)
-
Scott Barnes
Developer Evangelist
Microsoft.
March 18th, 2007 at 2:39 am
Work with all major browser vendors, not only with Microsoft, and make “consistent” implementation of standards to browsers come true…
March 18th, 2007 at 3:31 am
I think gaining inches at a time (even milimeters) is a winner) so that is how it has to be approached along with being obvious. If you are a constant buzz about things then you will eventually get through - go the subliminal route and don’t shut up. I agree that the bridges between browsers have to be made and a change in the perception of ie = evil and doing things for the sake of annoying web designers. If anyone can do this I know you can
March 18th, 2007 at 4:18 am
Evangelizing is all well and good, but at what cost? In my time I’ve seen people that have been preached at and allegedly “gotten” web standards and the value of them still continue to do horrendous work – because they don’t know *how* to do standards.
For my money, Molly, it’s training all the way. Once people know how, they get it, and properly. Then they’ll start wanting to have their products produce/support standards. And become internal evangelists, leaving you free to find other people to train.
March 18th, 2007 at 4:27 am
I’m not too sure if teaching the team about web standards is too necessary, as I seem to remember you yourself saying the developers get it, I think it’s probably all about bashing some common sense into the (I can only imagine is) horrific management structure.
Good luck with that. Someone needs to do it, and I reckon you’re probably just the right person for the job.
March 18th, 2007 at 4:44 am
.. and, what is it YOU want to do most from that list?
March 18th, 2007 at 4:51 am
David: I’m with the majority sentiment. Train within first. I think that’s a brilliant start and I have support across MS to do that. Second, work on interop with other browser / ua vendors. Travel and teach of course, but I’ll be doing that no matter who “sponsors” me
Keep the comments coming folks. This post will be seen by the people who can help me and in turn, help us all. Speak your minds, don’t hold back, as Scott said in an earlier comment!
March 18th, 2007 at 4:52 am
Just got your twitter plea. Be very upfront with what is ‘wrong’ with IE. I’m sure lots of ‘em know the standards but keep ‘em focused, motivated and kick their bums when needed. Next IE compatibility is very important. I hope IE8 reaches top css 2.1 compliance and does as much or even more than firefox on css3. But the rest are important as well. I think they really really really need to dig IE out of their OS. The current situation has the IE teams hands tied. Without that freedom they will always be limited in what they can do. Keep them and yourself proud of what you are all doing and laugh an awful lot. Break a leg.
March 18th, 2007 at 5:14 am
I agree with Norm! - rather than spreading the message, spread the feeling; once people really grok standards and love how great their own work is, they will do all the evangelising themselves.
March 18th, 2007 at 5:17 am
I think Steve Barnes said it well. Passion sells well. Cool and hip somewhat so. Let them know that IE7 was a great step, but it’s not the whole staircase yet. If they’re at Microsoft, they’re damn smart guys ‘n’ gals who can know and understand the web standards no drama - if they’ve got the encouragement, a goal, and the desire. Mols, from reading what you write, I think you’re just the one to instill such things.
PS, Make sure they know to be careful when extending standards, as we’ve seen what happens before.
March 18th, 2007 at 5:20 am
..that would be _Scott_ Barnes. Erf.
March 18th, 2007 at 5:22 am
Norm is right about training, both inside Microsoft and outside. But what software vendors also need to do is to make semantics, meaning and optimised markup and CSS part of their development tools - valid code is not enough. Microsoft have made a great start with Internet Explorer and parts of Expression.
Let’s see that work transferred to other products and also importantly to Microsoft web sites. If you could get them to make meaningful, accessible web content, now that would be something.
March 18th, 2007 at 5:27 am
It’s hard to know where to start. Possibly by letting them know that their good deeds with IE7 have not gone unnoticed. It’s just that IE6 hurt us an awful lot and we’ll take a long time to forgive them for that!
IE7 is a step forward but IE8 will need to be just as big a step forward to catch up to the other browsers. The topic has been discussed to the nth degree so I won’t rehash. From outside it’s hard to know if they are maintaining momentum or not.
It would be nice if they could avoid doing things like locking Win2k/XP SP1 users out from IE7. While it was great that they gave out a virtual pc image with IE6, couldn’t they have given one out with IE7? Such decisions seem based primarily on a business plan to force users to upgrade and developers to buy multiple windows licenses just for testing. A little more generosity wouldn’t go astray, given that they’ve created the problem where you can’t *really* run multiple IEs on the same machine.
Office applications should have their HTML export privileges revoked until they can do a better job
Every web developer has had the pain of cleaning up after Word at some stage, to say nothing of Excel (the horror, the horror). Maybe add a “simple HTML export” option which won’t attempt to create a layout, just dump the content. That’s all we want most of the time.
Outlook should be shot. That’s nothing to do with standards, just though I should throw it in there!
More constructively, it could definitely use better HTML email support.
It’s probably going to be a lot about MS’s culture. With a few exceptions (individuals or teams within the company), MS just doesn’t seem to “get” standards. Or believe in them. As a company, MS always seems to want to buy out standards so they can replace them with their own. The attitude comes across that standards are merely an annoyance to brush off while chasing down dollars - surely they could embrace standards and still keep their obscene profits?!
Anyway, they’ve taken a huge step forward by hiring you - a sign of positive change, hopefully
Good luck!
March 18th, 2007 at 5:57 am
I’m not sure if this is something you can help us with, but if you want to run Vista on Parallels (on Mac) you need to purchase Vista Business or Ultimate. Home or Premium version isn’t an option. We, web developers, don’t need the extras of the more expensive versions and so it is rather a waste of money if you’re just going to use Vista to test your websites. Parallels would help us (Mac users) save a lot of time, but it’s just stupid that you don’t get a free choice. Thought I just mention this from a web developer perspective, after all we want to do the effort to have our sites look perfect in all browsers.
I wonder if you could also help with us with the fact that Outlook doesn’t follow any standards. Right now its HTML email support is just a disaster.
Furthermore I agree on what others have mentioned here. MS need to learn from within. You are such great asset for MS and I hope they listen to you and really value what you have to say and teach. You give us hope Molly, thank you xxx
March 18th, 2007 at 6:37 am
I would definitely recommend training other parts of MS about Web Standards. Every MS product that helps produces Web or Internet technology or in some way touches it for their customers, needs to be in sync with Web standards. If MS starts producing Web standards compliant code automatically, well, that’s one huge advancement for the everyone–including MS.
March 18th, 2007 at 6:48 am
If IE could accept “application/xhtml+xml” properly, then it could make adoption of XHTML easier - which would have a knock-on effect for making web sites easier to view on mobile devices - some of which accept only XHTML rather than tag soup. Giving a user a dialogue box when faced with an XHTML page is not expected behaviour.
Sorry to sound like a shill (which I’m not) for the W3C, but SVG support would be great too. Some of the things which SVGers have been up to are exciting.
March 18th, 2007 at 6:59 am
So many of the points are mentioned above and I would agree with the need to train and spread from within. In my view Microsoft have made a lot of progress with IE7 and Expression Web, but on the developer side there appears to have been very little headway.
Sure enough .Net2 made some progress with standards but even then there was a need for addon adaptors to try and iron out the superfluous and unneeded tags. The adaptors cannot fix the primitive components though so the problems remain.
If Microsoft can get the developers toolkits, .net framework, and the developers themselves standards aware and be consistent throughout the teams then surely the applications and websites coming out of, and being produced by Microsoft, stand a better chance of being standards aware.
March 18th, 2007 at 7:13 am
I think we’re now close enough to say that CSS 2.1 support is now a real possibility in IE.next, although it may be nice to have smaller incremental updates. Leave CSS3 for now. The IE team gets it: make sure management doesn’t stop IE dev again.
Parts like Office could undoubtedly do far better if taught about standards (Outlook uses Word’s engine, right?), but as others have said, mainly focus on those parts that don’t get it. Those who do (like IE) can just be told what we really want next, and what we want later.
March 18th, 2007 at 7:23 am
#1 by way of #2; that is, push IE.next by way of internal training– not in the IE team so much as in groups that deeply influence IE. That’s how I’d tackle the situation, anyway.
March 18th, 2007 at 7:27 am
Thank you Molly for your willingness to confront the evil empire. Perhaps a quick demo to the “Softies” show them how a site works on Firefox then show them on IE7. Put the problem on the table, show everyone then ask…”Whats wrong here?”
March 18th, 2007 at 7:39 am
Training standards is a band-aid solution if people don’t have the standards religion. I’m not convinced that the developers do have the religion they may think they’re good in the abstract but if they believed deep down i think there would be more standards compliance, but maybe it *is* the management that’s the problem. Whichever group is lacking religion needs a good pastor.
March 18th, 2007 at 7:45 am
Ms. Holzschlag–
Personally, I would love to hear what you would like to accomplish. What you feel are your mission directives/objectives as set forth by Microsoft. What you personally feel are and were your intended objectives. What you feel are truly reasonable objectives that can be accomplished with Microsoft. Finally, how the development/design community can assist you in meeting those objectives.
I am disgusted to the point that I don’t care whether or not, as Zeldman or Veen [can’t recall which one — it was one of the Jeffs] characterized them, Microsoft as being the 800 pound gorilla.
Who can say, “simian ebola virus”?
March 18th, 2007 at 7:57 am
Not sure if it helps but I’ve always been one for selling the business advantages of change. If you want MS to embrace standards then they need good business reasons.
I’d have thought the interoperability between packages, the train once use many approach to creating output and the ability for their teams to focus on features and not basic functionality would all be drivers for MS.
Good Luck!
March 18th, 2007 at 8:11 am
I’d weigh in with a strong vote towards bridging gaps between the browser vendors and working towards a more consistently rendering platform and experience for developers. Veerle also hit my second point of ire right on the head- the Office/Outlook team is sorely in need of some standardista schooling, given the poor state of HTML email today. Go get ‘em, Molly! Thanks for fighting the good fight.
March 18th, 2007 at 8:13 am
Many good suggestions, I particularly like Malarkey’s angle — its not simply about validation, but also using markup well, creating accessible pages, and ultimately cutting down barriers in each application that obscure or block all of the goals of modern web development.
To that end, I’d love to see time spent with each team to walk them through what setup, modifications and custom work it takes to output valid and semantically good markup. This should be easy if not default in all applications, .NET platforms, and anything else that produces content that touches the web. And in some cases [like .NET features] it may come down more to customer education then development team education so perhaps there is some need to help them find ways to communicate all the goodTM being done there out to the general user base.
[If it sounds like I’ve worked with some shady .NET folks in the past, I have… and some good ones too… and in that their practices impact the final product as much as shortcomings with the platforms being used.]
March 18th, 2007 at 8:14 am
As Web standards advocates, we’ve all picked our own battles to fight with the knowledge that it’s not humanly possible to take everything on - we’d just burn ourselves out
And it’s great that you’re opening up what you see are priority issues, Molly, and asking for feedback.
One thing that I’m not sure anyone else has mentioned so far - the standards train is a moving one. We tend to forget that standards do evolve (which is why people are still stuck doing HTML 3.2, and badly).
Because of your privileged position, I think you would be very effective to coordinate liaison between the MS team and the W3C. Is there something wrong with the spec where technical requirements are misinterpreted due to ambiguity? The W3C needs to know. Is there a practical reason why other browsers are implementing CSS features better, but it’s not in IE.next? MS needs to know.
This could just be a general vision, but I’m sure with your magical capabilities you’ll find support internally (as you already do externally!) for pushing towards the horizon where standards and MS meet.
March 18th, 2007 at 8:28 am
I think starting with the internal folks, especially those making tools would be great. Train them and show them the benefits of standards and interoperability — get them passionate about it. You might also consider a broader approach, taking standards for example as a piece of over all best practices - accessibility, consistantacy, simplicity, etc.
As someone who has to work with .NET developers at times, I’d love to see more developers in that arena who were passionate and skilled in regards to standards.
Best of luck!
March 18th, 2007 at 8:45 am
I think the general consensus here is surfacing and yeah, the IE team probably is not the issue or the problem. While they know there’s areas to address, I think they know them by now, largely. The team is on it’s way and it’s the other parts of the company that MS is suffering and pushing it down through all their enterprise tools and to army’s of programmers who don’t get proper UI construction. Interoperability with their other products and IE is huge.
And not only interoperability, but code generated and examples given with other tools. Everything from MS Office, ASP.NET, Visual Studio.NET, SharePoint (huge offender) and those responsible via MSDN and whitepapers and training (Microsoft Press) to emphasize the correct ways to use the tools that have some level of support and improve those that don’t. People work by example and frankly, most example code from MS sucks.
March 18th, 2007 at 9:22 am
OK, my take is that you should concentrate on internal training and on traveling. Although the IE team seems to be pretty well versed in the standards by now, I doubt whether that’s the case for all other MS teams. Besides, I have the feeling that you really like traveling and evangelizing, and you should always do things that you like.
These two roles (and especially the internal MS evangelizing) are the ones that only YOU can fill; the other two roles can be filled by many other people and we do not NEED you for them. Of course any contribution you make will be gladly received, but there’s no *necessity* any more.
The IE.next compatibility seems to be adequately covered for now; if the IE team has questions some of the best minds in web development are ready to answer them.
As to writing/editing, you’ve done rather a lot of that, and here, too, there are plenty of other people who can take on this role.
So that’s my take.
March 18th, 2007 at 10:41 am
Train the MS people. Evangelise them. Convert every manager into a standards believer. Show them that there is money to be gained by adhering to standards.
Make the MS people evangelizers, get them to train their customers on sandards. As one of the largeste companies in the world they meet a zillion of customers every year. I think evangelizing through Microsoft might reach more people than when you would edit every single book on webstandards out there.
I think that the IE team is smart enough to seek your opinion when they need it. There are many other people outside Microsoft spreading the word.
March 18th, 2007 at 11:07 am
Good luck! We believe in you
March 18th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Evangelize. Once that takes hold, the rest will follow on its own.
March 18th, 2007 at 11:42 am
Molly, I suspect that you have a much better than any of us how things like from inside the campus at Redmond so I’m inclined to trust your judgement on what needs “fixing.”
That said, I can imagine that training is probably going to return the most dividends (teach someone to fish, and all that). I suspect that the IE team are *not* the people who need training. In fact, knowing people like Chris and Markus are on the job, I think that you could probably achieve a lot by getting them to talk to people in other departments.
But as I said, you’re in a much better position to judge the situation there. From my experience of other large companies, I suspect that the developers on the ground are actually pretty clued-in to standards and it’s the business, marketing and managing people who need to be convinced.
One last thing, Molly… this is an exciting time and you’re in a pivotal place right now; there’s a lot that can be accomplished. But. Please don’t take all of this on yourself. Call in help from the WaSP when you need it, make the most of the standards-savvy developers at Microsoft. Don’t go overboard with the travelling and training… you’ll be no good to us if you burn yourself out.
March 18th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Crikey, where on earth to start?
In conclusion, I come out thinking that training is the way, to spread the evangelism such that it will spread through the company eventually. That might mean we don’t see improvements to products for a year or so, but there are issues with Microsoft’s product development being so fragmented already that focusing on just the Office team, or just the ASP.NET team or just the IE team won’t do enough.
I mean just look at the fiasco with Outlook 2007. The IE team put a lot of good work into IE7 that would’ve had let people produce more semantic HTML email (regardless of whether that’s conceptually a good idea or not). At the same time Outlook destroys it by moving to the Word engine. Two teams, two products, two different directions. And if you went in screaming ‘Oi! ASP.NET! Noooo!’ you might only run into a similar development conflict if ASP.NET produce some amazing new semantic modelling tool whilst the Expression team or IE team producing something dedicated to scripting.
There’s just so much, no-one could ever expect you to go in and fix all them on your own at the same time. So right now, I’d ask you to lay foundations. Find your friends in the different teams. Maybe see if you can get them informally communicating about standards so that more joined up thinking can happen between products in the future. Then with them spreading the word inside MS you can take your eyes onto a specific product/department.
Come a point, sooner or later, that you do think products, I do think that the ASP.NET guys need a good prod. You can use ASP.NET with standards. You *don’t* need to wrap everything in a FORM, you don’t have to produce inline javascript but it takes so long to learn how to make it not do the wrong thing that ASP.NET becomes an uncompetative product. Much as I feel very lucky to be one of those people who can use it, I still wouldn’t recommend it.
Progressive enhancement, clean code, optimised default semantics… there’s so much that ASP.NET needs to do. Perhaps it needs some genuinely new engineering to replace the forms-based view state, rather than trying to hack validation into a semantically broken system. There’s a lot. But the team needs to really understand that semantics come first and stop thinking in presentational terms before they can do that. Otherwise it will still be flawed.
Best of luck Molly.
March 18th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
If I remember correctly, the devs will improove IE only in their standard compilant mode.
That being said, the appearance of HTML 5 (W3C’s one) and better cross-browser CSS will eventually lead to evangelization by itself.
So in my opinion your priority should be to “work for IE.next compatibility”. “Train internal Microsoft folks on standards” is a nice point as well, however, I think Chris Wilson is someone who’s dedicated to standards, and that’s what counts.
This is the must-have base we need, after this, we’ll probably be able to evangelize better then anythime before.
By the way: application/xhtml+xml would be nice in IE 8 (Next), however, in my opinion their definite last chance is IE 9 (after Next).
March 18th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
The main thing that would put IE on the map is getting it to render the Acid2 test correctly. If Acid2 rendered correctly by the next version, I’d know that the IE team is serious about implementing more standards friendly code with accessibility and usability into their future browser releases.
March 18th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Micah, considering how long Opera and Firefox needed to pass Acid 2, IE Next passing it is something not achievable.
IE is currently where Opera 3.6 was. I think IE.Next will not get better than Opera 7 was, for example.
March 18th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
My vote is for:
“Train internal Microsoft folks on standards”
Go to the source and make a difference. This will benefit the larger community in a huge way.
Also, I think you should get the ability to do polls on this here blog
Then you’d get the vote from those who may feel like they don’t have much to comment on as well.
March 18th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
I haven’t gone through all the comments, but I think Dan Rubin hit the nail on the head with:
“* don’t worry about the departments that already “get it” (e.g. the IE team), just focus on anyone inside who doesn’t understand the value of doing things the right way”
IE7 shows me that the IE team get it, but the new Outlook tells me that the Office team need some evangelising!
March 18th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
I’d like to see a version of IE that supports CSS positioning (passing the acid test would be a nice start). Proper support for the latest version of ECMA Script would be a bonus.
March 18th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
[…] Well, there are no guarantees that you’ll get your way in this respect, but as regular followers of this blog - and the world of web standards in general - you will probably know tha long-time WaSP lead Molly Holzschlag is off to work with Microsoft. Having done wonders in getting the company to make some big changes with IE (not alone, it has to be said, but certainly an instrumental part), Molly is hoping to walk in to the office on Monday with a list of to-dos, or to-look-intos. OK, it’s almost Monday for most people, but I’m sure that a day or two late won’t matter now, so head on over to Molly’s site and have your say. You have a direct line, so try to make the most of it folks. […]
March 18th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Well, it looks like you have a *great* list going here, but just to be sure I’ve posted on WaSP.
I would simply like to echo the comments about .Net. I know Visual Studio 2005 was a big improvement, as was the clean-up between .net 1.1 and 2, but it’s still causing unaware developers to use drag-drop controls that are inherently nasty in build and accessibility. Educating developers who are used to using that type of RAD environment - for example long time VB developers - is not an easy task.
On the flip side, Expression Web is a fantastic addition to the armory and will certainly help designers working alongside developers who choose Visual Studio, so that’s a great step in the right direction.
Enjoy the new role, Molly.
March 18th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Me? I’d like to see an easy way to put multiple forms on a .net page. The way all the server controls on a page have to sit in one form element is complete pants.
I’d also like to see .net adaptive rendering killed off, or at least disabled by default. Serving different HTML to different browsers based on their age is completely misguided.
March 18th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
As a JavaScript developer, I’m a bit biased, but I think IE.next is absolutely the most important thing at the moment. The IE team has seemed very, very receptive to our wishlists so far, but I want to make sure they realize how much catching up they have to do.
After that, I’d evangelize to all other teams that produce or consume HTML. But that’s not time-sensitive; IE.next is.
March 18th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Semantic code, especially for development tools
Strict implementation of emerging standards
IE engine in all MS apps or even as a free core, runtime and/or API
Open up newly created standards upon creation and try to find USP in sharing rather than protecting.
March 18th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Molly, thanks ever-so for taking our comments to heart, and on to Microsoft. You’re a gifted teacher, so I’m sure your evangelizing web-standards will be thorough and helpful to MS’s teams, aware of them or not. In turn, the more they can do to promote web-stardards into MS, the better.
My biggest request is that Microsoft becomes cognizant of the attitude they shape about web standards, as it trickles down through their products. Sure, some teams follow them, but MS primarily still treats markup as a lesser type of coding than their mainstays. It’s become embedded in the organization to some extent, and teaches MS-oriented engineers that markup is not as important as other types of coding. I run into a strong misconception and neglect of HTML, CSS and other front-end markup at my day job, and find I need to continually re-emphasize that it is an important piece of the puzzle, not a last-minute, structureless addition to the “real work”.
That would be a tectonic shift, in my mind, if MS could promote treating front-end markup as an actual craft, worthy of respect and specialization on teams. And if that could trickle down to external companies, that would be awesome.
March 18th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Teach and train on the WHY as well as the HOW.
In 2004, my last year at Microsoft, I read Zeldman’s “Designing with Web Standards” and it changed my life, but at the time I had difficulty convincing others of the business case for web standards. To affect real change at Microsoft you have to make the business case.
Everyone has to understand the WHY of web standards (especially management) or it’ll continue to be prioritized low in project plans. Help them understand why this will be profitable for the company.
Teach WHY to everyone and HOW to the implementors.
Product specific, I suggest you also consider SharePoint. Its new functionality is being positioned as a CMS for public sites. I anticipate we’re going to see a lot more SharePoint-based web sites springing up. One look at the code behind any SharePoint 2007 page will just make you cringe.
March 18th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Molly, first let me say that you are amazing. You’ve taught me to realize that MS isn’t an evil empire…that their developers are just like us and that there is hope. Your ability to take on huge challenges and make a difference is one of the most beautiful things about you.
As for MS…I can’t think of a better person than you to be training and evangelizing. I agree with so many comments before me…that training the internal MS developers on standards/interoperability is the key. Because it is in the day-to-day, line-by-line, byte-by-byte moments…that the developers can make MS a leader in standards and interoperability.
The two other thoughts that come to mind are:
direct feedback to internal MS folks on areas where you see changes need to be made. Your insight and network within MS is priceless.
I don’t know that it is your place to do this, but I keep thinking that if MS had metrics that clearly showed the current state of standards and the progress being made…that it would be very motivating. I’m thinking of how successful the use of the WebXM dashboard has been on our campus…to monitor progress on issues like security and accessibility.
And I’ll end with these thoughts. How awesome is it that you create this avenue for our voices to be heard. That you listen to both sides and strive to find the creative solutions that leave everyone smiling. Thanks for listening to our ideas. As the girl on the inside…I believe that you know the most effective actions to take.
March 18th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
To mirror what others are saying, I’m liking IE7 more every time I (have to) use it, in terms of it being a huge step up from IE6… and so, the first standards issue that springs to my mind at present isn’t with IE at all, it’s actually that whole “Outlook 2K7 - Word 2K7″ situation we face now. Can we raise Word 2K7’s standards support in the hope of rendering HTML emails with some degree of usefulness? Is some kind of decent CSS 2.1 support really that impossible to hope for?
(By the way, that isn’t meant to start the text-vs-html-email-content debate in ANY WAY. It’s merely a day-to-day difficulty I’m dealing with at present.)
I guess that’s symptomatic of other comments here - it’s not this piece in isolation so much as the whole puzzle of MS that doesn’t quite fit…
March 18th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
I would like to see a .activate() method added to embedded objects to once and for all get around the eolas patent. eg: document.getElementById(’myflashmovie’).activate();
I know this is probably not IE specific (eg. opera), but if other browsers are going to implement a similar “feature” then why not make it easy for us to disable that feature and get on with our lives.
maybe this idea has been thought of and not an option, but I havn’t seen anyone ask about so I am.
Chur,
Tobz
March 19th, 2007 at 12:02 am
I agree that the IE team “gets it”, but I’d like to see them posting about it on their team blog. I want to see IE developers posting about the bug they fixed today. That will show people that the team “gets it” and that they are working on fixing it. Even better would be a public roadmap similar to what Mozilla does for Firefox. We need to know what they’re planning to do so that if something important is missing we can let them know.
I also agree that the Office products need serious help: Word, Excel, Outlook, Sharepoint, etc.
This might be a bit pie-in-the-sky, but anyone at Microsoft who works on the multitude of web sites needs to learn how to do things the right way. That would help Microsoft demonstrate that they are committed to standards.
Maybe it’s just me, but the MSDN documentation sucks pretty bad. Things that in my mind are related are spread across multiple places and finding them is hard. Once I do find something relevant, it woefully falls short of my expectations. Those of us who have to work with Microsoft software need good reference material.
I think everyone at Microsoft, even those that get standards, need to understand the value of goodwill. There are certain things that need to be done which are of lesser priority than others, but will have a greater return on goodwill than the higher priority items. Also, items which won’t take long to implement (less than an hour?) should be done sooner even if low priority.
Last but not least, I think it’s time for Microsoft to move towards more frequent releases. Besides a new major version every year or two, give us more incremental versions every few months.
March 19th, 2007 at 12:12 am
IE.next!
Better support for Arabic and Farsi in terms of numerics and OL lists, although CSS3 has it built-in when is it going to be implemented on IE7? As every where else in the world IE is the dominant browser so supporting Arabic and Farsi OL with proper numbering is something that helps us developer to acheive better i18n using standards.
Here’s a work around that I’ve built several months ago, I’d like it built-in.
March 19th, 2007 at 2:33 am
My input would be on a more philosophical level. Underneath many of the problems mentioned, I believe is the same root - Microsoft’s apparent foundational assumption that MORE is better. That is, to fix something, or improve it, or make it easier, the answer is always to wrap MORE around the thing in question. This Rube Goldberg approach to design has hamstrung them for years. They could use a lot more cohesion and simplicity in their approach to everything they do. Boil things down, make them simpler - don’t ladle complexity on top of confusion.
March 19th, 2007 at 3:08 am
Another vote for working with the .NET team to tidy up the nasty generated code.
It is easy to demonstrate the benefits of Web Standards with layered separation of XHTML, CSS and Javascript, so a site will still be fully operable with only XHTML and CSS, or even only XHTML. But try developing a site like that using .NET controls …
Inline styling, inline (and weighty) JS, that full-page wrapper form, and, my favourite, validation error messages hard-coded in the XHTML that are hidden by inline CSS and revealed using Javascript. If your browser has no CSS you see (or hear) all the error messages before you do anything on the form.
Microsoft’s challenge is that .NET could and should be a industry leader that generates, by default and without extra effort, code that is clean, accessible, usable, readable and optimised. .NET code should be the quality standard everyone else strives to attain.
Wishing you all the best.
March 19th, 2007 at 3:17 am
I’m right along with Nick. Evangelizing standards and training interested people is enough to cover all 4. Go Molly!
March 19th, 2007 at 5:26 am
Evangelizing inside Microsoft must be what is most lacking now, so that should also give most benefit in the long term. It’s not only the IE team that needs to hear about these standards. I have no idea how Microsoft is organized, but there seems to be a plethora of developers that needs to know how to develop web pages, including the Office team (Sharepoint is a mess and I’m sure the applications can use some MollyTidying).
Great effort, Molly. I really hope you can change Microsoft and their relationship with (web) standards with your fabulous work!
March 19th, 2007 at 5:33 am
Another vote for fixing the .NET generated code. I’m a Java programmer at heart but I’d switch in an instant if .NET would generate markup I wouldn’t be ashamed to put my name on.
Now for my fantasy-hat…
A shorter build schedule for IE; all this talk about IE.next is great, but if we don’t see it for another five or six years, why bother?
March 19th, 2007 at 6:05 am
Molly, all of the things you have referred in your post require attention.
The biggest challenge, i believe, is to convince the responsible stuff (administrators), that it would be in microsofts own best interest to adapt the standards. Otherwise the developers wont be able to pass beyond the microsofts own standards.
For me the IE.next compatibility seems to be the most important part at the moment. Solving that, will help to solve all other points you have mentioned - even if people do understand standards but are unable to apply them - we will still be standing on the same place, as 6 years ago.
As a lot of people have written in comments above mine, the next standard-compliant, table-less Visual Studio, would be a real present for a lot of developers all around the world. When i work in VS, i switch directly to the code view, as using their GUI is killing all the design work, and some elements there are still impossible to make standard compliant (some aspects of radio buttons for example).
Good luck with this big task! =O)
March 19th, 2007 at 6:10 am
I really agree with Eric. Some of the generated .NET code drives me mad.
Its such a nice environment to code in, Visual Studio 2005 is a joy to code with and C# is a great language.
But some of the code that ASP.NET generates really tarnishes the whole experience.
Making it so the next iteration of VS being “Strict” out of the box would be a fantastic step.
But also as Eric says, timelines is important. IE7 is a nice step (not as nice as it should of been IMO) but if we have to wait another 5 years for the next step…
March 19th, 2007 at 6:57 am
Lets keep it simple:
Work for IE.next compatibility
This is the single most important need. I don’t have words to really express this importance.
We must, really must have better standards support in IE.next.
March 19th, 2007 at 7:20 am
Bring back the bug-tracking system used during the beta stages of IE 7 (or some other bug-tracking system).
If there’s one thing more frustrating than finding bugs in IE, it’s not having a way to ensure that they get fixed in the next release. Having you (and others, like ALA and QuirksMode) to voice our frustrations on the big-picture stuff for us is great, but as with any piece of software, there are also a lot of small things that should be fixed in IE. If Microsoft would just let us tell them about these problems and gather the bugs in a way that they could be acted upon, we wouldn’t all need our own individual “IE bugs list” webpages.
March 19th, 2007 at 8:14 am
If Microsoft it going to continue using the “save as html” option inside MSWORD application, it should have options to export a css web page. There should also be some very basic templates, like blog ones, announcment type ones, simple 2 column and 1 column versions that will help users who use MSWORD to put together and export a basic CSS web page. Not sure if this already exists in Frontpage, but I figure that if people are going to use MSWORD for producing word processing documents etc, an option inside of MSWORD like that would be useful. Especially, if the average user is not interested in using Frontpage.
March 19th, 2007 at 9:54 am
I don’t suppose MS would be willing to make their rendering engine Open Source? It would make things go soooo much easier. We’d all be willing to help out. Really.
In any case, I’d like to put my vote down for better CSS3 support. Thanks!
March 19th, 2007 at 11:56 am
@DanielS: You might be right in that it could take a while for IE.next to pass the Acid test, but I think that making as many strides as possible in the next version would be a sign for all of us to know that the Internet Explorer team is committed to a more standards friendly browser.
If we can just see some steps in this direction, I’d feel much better about using IE.
March 19th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Oooh boy, do you really want the whole shopping list?
What the web development community needs from MS, as far as I can tell, is for the IE team (and the .NET team, and the Office team) to make standards a priority instead of just paying lip service. To really support CSS 2.1 so we can start moving on to CSS 3. To support application/xml+xhtml.
From your list, I’d choose “Evangelize standards”, since (optimistically, at least) one would hope the rest would automatically from that. Teach MS not only *how* the standards are supposed to work, but *why* it’s so important to all of us, and to the future of the web. And then maybe they’ll care enough to actually do something about it.
If I could ask for just one concrete thing, though, it would be for IE.next to support the display:table (and table-cell, table-row, etc) properties. Pretty please?
March 19th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
I hope I’m not getting ahead of things but I think it’d be great if they’d implement stuff from the ‘de facto’ standards pool, like css3, maybe html5,…
I think that training is smart too, especially for the Outlook team. Just don’t burn yourself out.
March 19th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
There’s a lot of specific things relating to standards which would be nice to see. I think showing people at Microsoft the way standards can benefit them personally would be a good thing to work on.
Telling the developer of an ASP.NET control that the markup it outputs needs to change because it doesn’t match a standard might not interest them. But showing how standards-based markup is more logical and readable, showing how CSS can transform it in efficient and powerful ways and showing the decreased download times on top of this might swing the balance.
As the IE team have committed to improving standards compliance, I think the output from .NET is the next important thing.
Making Microsoft websites better comply with standards (including HTTP and other hard-to-see ones) and become more accessible would be another great thing. There does seem to be a general movement towards standards trickling into Microsoft websites (MSDN2, Live Search, etc) and you’re the perfect choice to help nurture this.
March 19th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Message Number One: Get Open!
Web 2.0 is here and it’s all about interaction. Web 3.0 will come soon and it will be all about mash-ups and built-on-the-spur-of-the moment situational applications. The ONLY way those get build is with open systems and services that are standards compliant. To survive, Microsoft will evolve (like everyone else) from a products company to a services company. Or, they’ll die a long, slow, painful death.
There are a lot of good suggestions so far, but too many of them are related to specific products, not to the concept of complete standards adoption.
Asking for fixes to this product or that product is like asking Eastman Kodak for a new line of film.
Get open by systemic adoption of standards across the board.
March 19th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Molly, I’m in agreement with the teach/evangelize comments. Three suggestions for you:
I’d suggest that you get to know and educate the MS MVPs for ASP.NET. These folks are talking to developers at user group meetings all over the globe each month. They can become an ally in getting standards adopted at Microsoft, in the workplace, in corporate America, and beyond. Scoble can give you the A-List to target first.
I’d suggest you subscribe to Milan Negovan’s blog — Aspnetresources.com. He’s been at this MS+standards thing for quite some time.
I’d suggest you contact the folks over at Windows Live Writer whose product seems incapable of generating valid XHTML — and who responded to my inquiry about this topic with an official “XHTML valid markup wasn’t a priority for the first release.”
And a bonus suggestion: Celebrate the victories and forget any setbacks. Stay upbeat and enjoy the challenges!
March 19th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Some of the above comments about bug trackers and the multitude of wishlists reminded me that Microsoft Connect sucks really bad. Fixing it is probably outside the scope of what you’re there to do, so I won’t bother going into detail, but let’s just say it’s really hard to see what bugs are already reported. What we need is a bug tracker that works well. We need somewhere that we can combine our wishlists together. I’m envisioning a sort of social networking-type site where everyone makes their list and for each list item, the number of people who have that item on their list is tallied. Then, the IE dev team and WaSP could work together to prioritize the items. Items should be categorized to make it easier to browse them.
Evangelizing is definitely important. You need to get Microsoft employees passionate about web standards. But having the passion won’t be enough, you need to have somewhere to point them so that they can learn how to do things the right way. A lot of good stuff has been written by many people, but that’s part of the problem: the collective knowledge of the standardistas is spread across the Web. It needs to be collected into a smaller number of places to make it easier for people to learn from. This is perhaps something that everyone can help with. It’s too big a task for one person; I know because I tried.
A few weeks ago, before I got laid off due to shortage of work, I had started writing a reference guide to HTML, CSS, and accessibility. I’m not a great writer, so even the part I did finish I wasn’t happy with. The idea was a combination of the W3C specifications on HTML and CSS, cross-referenced with the WCAG guidelines. For example, the page about the table element would refer to the accessibility guideline regarding the summary attribute. The whole thing was to be easier to read than the official specifications without losing the essense of the information, and be chalk full of real-world examples. My intention was to later expand this manual to include useful techniques, and include HTML and CSS style guides. The company I worked for was fairly small, but it had some of the same quality issues. You can’t tell someone to go read a whole of bunch of web sites and expect them to come back with a better understanding; you need to be able to shove a book in their hands that tells them exactly what they need to know instead of making them sift through the information overload of the Web.
March 19th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
While I generall agree with Jon Hicks, I still believe Molly can do a lot of good in the IE.next team. Maybe they don’t need convincing or evangelizing but Molly, you can still take care of how standards are implemented in the next version of IE. IE7 was a good start but there is still work to do (there always is, isn’t it?). But of course Jon is right about the Outlook team.
March 19th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
[…] molly.com: Redmond, Here I Am Molly Holzschlag is starting a consulting gig with Microsoft to fight for standards and interoperability. She want to know what her readers want her to work on while she’s at Microsoft. […]
March 20th, 2007 at 1:25 am
Evangelising is one thing, and it’s something you do so well, with contagious passion, and you should carry on doing that, Microsoft or not.
On the Microsoft scale, it’s probably not evangelising any more, it’s exorcism ! I agree with the “train and spread” viral method. They need some people who are well and fully trained and convinced by standards who can spread the good word in turn, properly and efficiently, you can’t be everywhere at the same time Molly !
I don’t know that much about the insides of Microsoft and I have no names to drop, but I believe that if anyone can convert them and teach them the error of their ways, it’s you !
March 20th, 2007 at 2:07 am
As a .NET developer, I’d love to be able to produce standards compliant code without an effort (but don’t tell my boss). I don’t want to have to build in my own functions when there are .NET functions that do it for me - with tables. I don’t want to have to forcibly include CSS control adapters when the darn thing shouldn’t be outputting layout tables in the first place.
So my personal vote would be for an improvement in standards support for .NET. Although I understand other areas are important too…
March 20th, 2007 at 3:05 am
Microsoft are a pround company and like to be ahead of the game rather than the current situation, so why not set them a target they can aspire to: Like having the best made browser. i.e. the most complete implementation of css 1/2.1, and beyond the acid2 test
March 20th, 2007 at 5:58 am
A big thing for me is HTML and CSS support in Outlook. If we could get MS to use the IE rendering engine for Outlook (instead of the Word engine), I’d be a happy camper.
I’ll second JackP’s call for better standards support in .NET. I haven’t done much with .NET, but from the little bit I have seen, MS doesn’t produce clean enough code with consistent enough rendering and — worse yet — doesn’t give you an easy, CSS-based way to override its settings.
I’d like to see IE get to where Firefox, Safari and Opera are in terms of DOM support and CSS support. IE7 is a far sight better than IE6, but IE8 could be better still.
March 20th, 2007 at 7:21 am
I think the current IE team is pretty darn up to date on standards.
How can you say that with a straight face? IE7 doesn’t even fully support HTML 4 yet. Until IE can parse every HTML element (including the q element), anything else above any beyond that is a pipe dream.
Don’t run before you can crawl. Get basic HTML 4 support first.
March 20th, 2007 at 7:57 am
Molly, it’s great to see this new role for you. I can’t think of anyone better suited to it.
Out of the items you mentioned, I’d vote for training internal Microsoft folks on standards, especially the Outlook and Office teams on HTML rendering/creating (with the recent HTML email rendering being one of the key issues there). I feel that the IE.next development for improved DOM and CSS support/compatibility is a big priority as well.
Thanks for opening up this discussion–can’t wait to see how things go at Microsoft in the coming months.
March 20th, 2007 at 8:03 am
[…] Redmond, Here I Am […]
March 20th, 2007 at 8:47 am
First of all I would like to congratulate you on your new position. Okay, now that that’s said, down to business:
I believe that Microsoft’s biggest regret is the fact they are burdened with legacy support in all new projects. They tried to buck the trend and create their own standards set back in the early 90s, but it didn’t take — the rest of the industry went in a different direction. I can’t say they failed because they are a wildly successful corporation, but it has caused them undo grief in trying to ensure older software and systems work in new builds of anything they create. I predict we’ll see an end to that. I predict any post-Vista OS releases and any IE.next releases are going to forgo that legacy support and be written on a clean sheet. I can’t blame them. Some customers will scream bloody murder but all in all it’ll be for the good. Anyway, Apple’s gotten away with doing that — like, what, four times is it? I feel it’ll be a step in the right direction. They will be able to create something new-and-improved all while dropping millions of lines of code.
This is a grand opportunity for you and MS, and MS is listening. Standard-standards will put them back in the worldwide loop, so to speak. All you have to do is show them how this will prevent them from re-living five year roll-outs and bloated code fiascoes. MS’s primary goal is to turn a profit, which is completely understandable. The adoption of and compliance with standard-standards will make roll-outs easier, faster, and they will realize a better profit in a shorter period. They know this. Your job should be easy because MS already knows this. All you have to do is support that notion and show them how.
March 20th, 2007 at 8:49 am
From what I can gather, Microsoft is pretty clued up when it comes to web standards. They just seem to have a mental block when implementing standards with their products. Hosting the WebDD conference in Reading earlier in the year, releasing Expression Web (which generated decent HTML code) and pushing for XHTML compliant in ASP.NET 2.0 is a start.
I have two main beefs.
1. The IE rendering engine needs an overhaul. It has been suggested elsewhere that the engine needs a full rebuild, instead of constant patching to bring it in line. Enough has been said on this and I’m sure they’re well aware on campus.
2. ASP.NET spits out poor HTML. I’m a client side developer who uses ASP.NET on some projects, and I’m appalled by the rendered HTML. I can’t use the majority of ASP.NET Controls because of the poor HTML. The only controls I use are the basic form controls (textboxes, buttons etc.) and basic validation if I must.
The “CSS Friendly Adapters” open source plugin attempts to patch the generated HTML, but doesn’t make the HTML any nicer. It simply makes it easier to apply CSS. For example the Login control displays a basic login form (username/password) in a table. The CSS Friendly Adapters changes this into a bunch of nested divs. No fieldset, no legend, poor labeling, and a bunch of poorly named divs and spans.
So my main beefs with ASP.NET are the following:
1. Allow more than one form on a page. I write my HTML before the CSS so I write my form elements around the forms. When I convert to ASP.NET I have to put one form tag around everything. It’s not semantic and it’s frustrating. Surely it must be an accessibility gotcha also.
2. Have the server controls render decent HTML by default. Collections of form elements should be marked up with decent fieldset and label elements.
3. Just because the HTML is valid, doesn’t mean it’s any good. From personal experience it’s a struggle to build a website using ASP.NET and remain completely in control of the HTML. My final beef is the naming of element IDs and NAME attributes. If controls are nested within controls the IDs can become long and convoluted, and they cannot be programmatically set. Here’s an example:
>input name=”ctl00$content$UcLogin2$txtEmail” type=”text” id=”ctl00_content_UcLogin2_txtEmail” /
March 20th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Outlook is an e-Mail client. Because Internet design/development firms want to migrate HTML content into an e-Mail client rather than explore or use more suitable communication methods, does not warrant Microsoft making any adjustment to its rendering engine simply to appease a very small segment of the product’s customer base. E-mail is text based communication .. period. The use of the Word engine is appropriate.
ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2005 can be used to produce standards compliant content with an XHTML 1.1 DTD and with a MIME type of application/xhtml+xml and WCAG Priority 2 code using the basic control adapters. Albeit a few minor adjustments are necessary to accommodate machine validation. ORCAS, the next version of Visual Studio, will, if all the hype is met according to Scott Guthrie, produce more efficient code that maintains standards compliance.
IE7 .. well, it is a significant improvement. It is still a damn mess in terms of performance in how page zoom and tabbing was implemented. I won’t even get into issues of the EV SSL certs and how that can, probably will, promote a gross false sense of security.
I personally, do not believe, that with applications/software for Internet communication that evangelism is the primary route to pursue. The market place has produced and will continue to produce the necessary evangelism. The changes being affected are a result of those things and not from a cultural mindset that existed with Microsoft back in the days when their product development was for the Apple. They should, however, probably re-visit that culture.
The biggest things that Microsoft can do is not to toss a product out into the market either half-baked or half done. The second thing is to take a lesson from NASA –
their code and applications have to be right. A little common sense can help, too, –if you need to drive a nail, don’t do anything fancy … pick up the damn hammer and hit the nail.
March 20th, 2007 at 9:22 am
I think Microsoft’s problem lies in their internet technologies. Before my time as a web developer, I used their Office products and I was, and still is, very pleased with them.
But today when I think of Microsoft, I think of them not following the standards and me working more just to make things work in IE. They must understand that the internet isn’t some kind of software. They can’t just make their own rules and ignore the rules other browser manufacturers follow.
Also I think that it is quite fun that Firefox is developed by programmers that don’t get paid but IE is. So, if they would collaborate better and be focused on creating a piece of good software, the future for IE would be better.
March 20th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Hi Molly. I think you need to do the exact same exercise when you get to Redmond’s offices that you’re doing here. (And I just wanted to add this idea to the open thread here, because I think you already “get it” yourself. =)
Listen to them, like you’re listening to us.
You have such a wonderful opportunity here, and a challenging one for certain, to reach many many smart dedicated people who are just as torn between competiting factors as we of the “web developer” community that consumes these products are.
We’re all quite confident that they’ve brought you in to do the things that come naturally to you like evangelize and train and get in touch with peoples passions on these subjects. But my request is that you listen to the developers and product managers at MS and find out what their passions are, how they relate to making the world better thru web standards, and then try to motivate them to make those changes that make the world better for everyone.
I don’t think it’s about any one product or one feature, it’s about the attitude that we can do more by working together and by communicating openly and proactively, and by marching in step when we can, and in promising new directions when we can’t.
One early commenter called it “find the business cases for web standards,” and that’s what got me thinking along these lines. Another said “lots of devs there will already get standards” so find as many people as you can, and tap into their energy. Great change can come of it!
Welcome to Redmond, and good luck. We’ll be listening; if you need more help, just ask.
March 20th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
My vote is to focus on training Microsoftees on Web Standards - not just the theories but actually the use and implementation of - because then I see that the rest would follow through (future versions of IE, Outlook, .net generated code, etc.) If they shared the frustration that we feel with their current products then they will be more keen to change them!
March 20th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
As Eric said:
A shorter build schedule for IE; all this talk about IE.next is great, but if we don’t see it for another five or six years, why bother?
I’m all for the shorter builds! Microsoft comes across as an unwieldy behemoth, making huge changes at each release. Make smaller more incremental changes, but do it constantly. Send this through the updates, so people’s browser stays current. This way you can slowly add in support for various CSS features not currently supported. It is silly to make these huge monster releases.
I’m also with Tom for support of XHTML. I have a feeling that a lot of the current gripe about XHTML is all about the lack of support in MIE. If people could use it and play with it, maybe we could find a way forwards through this current HTML5/XHTML 2 mess?
March 20th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
What about Using the IE engine to drive Outlook 2007 instead of Word!
March 20th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Plant a bomb and blow the whole place up so when they start again, they can do it properly…
March 20th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
When you were in the UK you should have picked up some UK power cords. Hand a power cord to a Microsoft guy then ask him to plug his computer into the US sockets on the wall using it. If he does not grok the need for standards then whip him with it until he does.
March 21st, 2007 at 12:39 am
Get them to realize they’re tracking a moving target, and need to be on board for supporting the standards that are being written now, not just those that are half a decade old already (although those are a MUST, of course). I’m not expecting full offline storage, css3 columns, canvas and APNG support in IE7+1, but it sure would be nice if they kept the existence of these things in mind while developing that version, so that it’ll be something they can implement, interoperably, for IE7+2.
(Joining the new HTML WG is a good first step, but the actions therein will matter much more (how much will Microsoft fight making use of the work already done by the WHATWG?) - and then getting any of the results actually into IE… well, it seems to me you have your work cut out for you.)
March 21st, 2007 at 6:15 am
There are many of us web standard pro activists who evangelize in our own communities. It is a struggle. It’s hard to be on the same page when books are still being published with old school web design techniques, poorly written CSS concepts and lack of more advanced instructions. Thanks to those authors and publishers who get it!
The CSS Standard community on line is an unorganized place for someone who doesn’t know where to look or what to decipher as best practice.
On your quest to travel and evangelize, call in the troupes for another global movement.
Save Web Standards, save the world. Well, not save it, just advance it quickly.
Molly - thanks for your passion and drive and good luck at Microsoft!
A Web Standard Pro Activist in Chicago
March 21st, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Hi Molly
I just want to back up all the calls for educating the staff in the offending teams. The biggest offender I have to work with is SharePoint - Microsoft’s “website in a box”. They’re still in the “accessibility = separate site” stage, with a hidden Javascript powered link to a “more accessible” mode.
March 22nd, 2007 at 2:01 am
Hi
As a ASP.NET developer I would echo the comment made earlier about rallying the ASP.NET MVPs to your cause.
From those that I correspond with, they are well aware of web standards and to a point I think everyone under Scott Guthries’ remit are. The real problem lies with the demarcation between server side and client side developers, and where this line is drawn. Whilst the advances in Visual Studio as a coding tool are fantastic, and the basic model for developing rich web applications using the .net framework is (I believe) second to none, the generated html still leaves something to be desired. What misses most is that server side developers assume that the basic controls are all that they have to work with. In other words. if it doesn’t do it ‘out of the box’ it’s wrong. The reality is that it is possible to generate truly accessible, semantically pure, rich content driven web applications with .NET, it just requires a bit more work that perhaps it should.
Where the join is not so clear is the UI developer, with Expression producs to work with, still has problems interfacing with the back end developer. The two worlds typically don’t work well together. Developers have their focus on UML, use case scenarios, and if lucky, a standards aware architect to guide them. But in most cases this is not the case. Why? Because the messages from microsoft are not joined up, like the software they produce.
At the end of the day, the software is a tool. It will produse web applications that are standards compliant but only if the development team use the tools to produce this. It sounds so bloody obvious, but it just doesnt happen.
Ideally the framework could go further to ensure this out of the box, and there is a fantastic opportumity with the next visual Studio release to take this much further. Either this will be driven (ideally) from within Microsoft. More MSDN content and evangelism would go a long way to assisting this. Here the MVPs will be key. They are all active in user groups and mailing lists and have the ear of the Redmond teams.
Your role as evengelist at Microsoft probaby has a much wider remit than the development tools products. This area is however crucial. The march forward has already begun and Microsoft are already taking huge steps to ensure it continues. You help will be invaluable in this. Help them join up a standards strategy across the product ranges. Make them get it right. make them understand the importance of doing so!
If you examine where standards can marry with the wider strategy of application development at Microsoft you will have a clear direction, and I believe that they will listen.
To those who merely want to ‘bash the bad giant’, I would say grow up.
FWIW
Peter
March 22nd, 2007 at 4:00 am
This is a direct quote from what I said over at Webstandards.org. I think it’s more than valid, in fact I consider it urgent.
This is a no-brainer: support for application/xhtml+xml in Internet Explorer. I know Microsoft has ditched this one for IE 7 as well, and the claimed to have some sort of reason.
But the Microsoft-way of serving XHTML with XML namespaces is to serve it as XML. And if we go about it that way, XHTML is serving no purpose at all. Then it’s either HTML or XHTML. SGML or XML.
If Microsoft were to add application/xhtml+xml support we would acctually be able to use XHTML for it’s benefits, rather than (not) using it because all we are serving it up as HTML 4.01. Since SGML isn’t an inferior standard, nothings bad wrong with that, but there’s still no true XHTML. All because of IE.
I regard this as highly important, so far I’m sticking with HTML 4.01 because I really don’t see a reason for XHTML … at all. I keep my HTML 4.01 just as wellformed and use my own naming conventions: only lowercase (xhtml-style). If I want to go XHTML I can, but since it’s still just HTML I don’t.
March 22nd, 2007 at 7:16 am
Standards… so they will know that they don’t own the web.
March 22nd, 2007 at 9:16 pm
To add to my last comment - I’d love to see the object element implemented properly. no more embeds, multiple objects, or conditional comments.
Man, that’d be sweet.
March 23rd, 2007 at 2:51 am
[…] In the questions and answers it turned out that some people were working on making accessible Intranets, and had been talking about the issues with Microsoft. Apparently there have been some rumblings going up the food chain at MS in the last few weeks, I wonder if >a href=”http://www.molly.com/2007/03/17/redmond-here-i-am/”>Molly’s post had anything to do with that? […]
March 24th, 2007 at 7:18 am
The Microsoft HTML Help compiler [CHM]is in desperate need of update to standards and security. The version 1.4 SDK was last updated in 2000. Win help is now a sunset format and not supported by Vista. The use of frames should be re-visited. Inclusion of applets and ActiveX within the compiled file should be abandoned. URL identification should be implemented, possibly an address bar. Including access to the IE phish database for embedded URLs makes sense. Making the compilation format multi-operating system compatible while still maintaining the same, or similar, final GUI has strong merit. With a security lock down of the format, CHM use across networks would no longer be a security issue. The compiler should be able to access and compile files from any standards based development platform, whether it be HTML, .NET, PHP, whatever. The list is endless.
Help file authorship and compilation that meets standards and security and provides a functional and simple end-user interface, that animal, as of yet, doesn’t exist.
March 24th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Go with your heart because that’s where your energy will best be used.
March 26th, 2007 at 11:20 am
Molly,
just a full-time Web Developer here. I’ve read a few of these comments and have to say that there are a lot of good comments and a some whining about certain things. In particular, one single form tag in ASP.NET is not anti-semantics. Granted, it would be nice design a webpage with multiple forms like many other server-side development environments. If a developer uses ASP.NET, BY CHOICE, they get to work around the form/forms issue. It’s not a standards issue, it seems that you have a big enough battle ahead of you to worry about this particular issue.
ASP.NET outputting valid (X)HTML with CSS-friendly ID tags on the other hand would be much appreciated by any designer, IMHO.
I definitely agree with Micah, the ACID2 test should be a priority. Meeting standards is also about caring for accessibility through all mediums and users, including the more challenged folks with disabilities.
March 27th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
I’ll put my opinions of Microsoft aside for this one.
If Microsoft simply starts making friends in the open source, standards, and community driven world, they will be successful.
Makes me wonder if Microsoft is failing in this area, because the best of the web isn’t a result one community, it’s really all of them.
Stop competing with the ideas and start competing with effort. Mozilla’s Firefox is hot, simply because they put more effort into it, not because they came up with the idea.
Maybe Microsoft just need to be more friendly… Maybe us too.
March 27th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
Please please! ask them to restore the mouse orientation feature. I am dyslexic and the ability reorient my mouse made it possible for me to use a mouse right-side-up (using it upside-down was causing serious carpal tunnel syndrome). I don’t understand why they took a working accessibility feature and just dumped it! I am running out of old mice that I can use…
Thanks
H.
March 28th, 2007 at 7:11 am
Heather–
Possibly take a look at the Kensington Expert Mouse. It is a large trackball device with 4 programmable buttons [the right button can be programmed to act like the standard left button, etc.], a programmable scroll wheel [can be set for scrolling at clockwise or counter clockwise] and a wrist pad. USB or mouse port compatible. IBM compatible or Mac. It is a 100 dollar device but worth the money. 5 year product guarantee, and of course, returnable for refund from any major retailer. Hope this helps.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
This is a no-brainer: support for application/xhtml+xml in Internet Explorer. I know Microsoft has ditched this one for IE 7 as well, and the claimed to have some sort of reason.
makes you wonder why people have comments at all.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Aubrey Island Says:
March 27th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
I’ll put my opinions of Microsoft aside for this one.
If Microsoft simply starts making friends in the open source, standards, and community driven world, they will be successful.
just an example.
March 30th, 2007 at 3:35 am
I’m so grateful that you are working with Microsoft on Web Standards. We need people with powerful voices so Microsoft can finally start making big improvements on their browsers. Thanks, you’re awesome!
March 30th, 2007 at 8:41 am
The bottom line is MS doesn't give a crap about:
MS IE has 76%+ web-browser market-share. They think they rule the world; why would they change their tactics/strategies if they are the leading web-browser?
MS, simply put, are bullies and care nothing about the public good, open source, responsibility, public relations, standards, etc., etc. etc.!
March 30th, 2007 at 8:45 am
One more thing to add: MS has taken a giant leap backwards in email marketing for Windows Vista. From what I’ve read, the new Outlook will use deprecated HTML; yes, HTML, not XHTML nor CSS using tables! All out the wayside! MS bites the big one!
April 4th, 2007 at 9:45 am
[…] In the questions and answers it turned out that some people were working on making accessible Intranets, and had been talking about the issues with Microsoft. Apparently there have been some rumblings going up the food chain at MS in the last few weeks, I wonder if Molly’s post had anything to do with that? […]
April 7th, 2007 at 4:37 am
[…] On a separate note, Molly Holzschlag, from Molly.com, is asking for everyones input with regards to links to resources you use when encountering issues with IE7 and links to specific issues that you have found while using IE7. She will use these to put together a ‘wiki’ that can be accessed publicly and she will also be using it to aid her in the work she is doing at Microsoft. […]
May 4th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
do the thing that you like.
I like (IE.next compatibility )
thank you Molly
May 27th, 2007 at 10:45 am
I agree with Norm! - rather than spreading the message, spread the feeling; once people really grok standards and love how great their own work is, they will do all the evangelising themselves.
June 2nd, 2007 at 7:56 am
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June 2nd, 2007 at 1:27 pm
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June 4th, 2007 at 6:33 am
Molly,
Many thanks for your heart ahd passion in advocating for same web standard for everyone. As a deaf-blind webmaster like myself, I often run into problems accessing information on many website due to poor coding and browsers not being fully accessible. I for one support the idea of bridging the companies together in designing one standard for all browsers. Keep up the great work and lead the way in training the people at MS. Smile.
June 13th, 2007 at 5:32 am
Hi, I tend to think on the same lines as the majority. As sure as Vegemite is Australian, so to Microsoft has a social responsibility to the community. Greetings from an Ozzy living abroad.
June 13th, 2007 at 8:45 am
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June 13th, 2007 at 8:46 am
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