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Carl Camera

Standards Turnabout in Redmond?

All the reports back from Mix06 seemed to tout how the Internet Explorer team -- and Microsoft in general -- has seen the light and is truly embracing Web Standards. Web Expression, the new eighteen ton CMS application touts XHTML compliancy in every marketing message it sends out.

Now comes along Windows Live Writer. It's a Windows desktop application that allows you to create and edit blog entries without opening up a browser.

The WLW Blog, when introducing the beta stated:

"We want Writer to work well with every blogging service out there. If you can’t get Writer to work with your blog, we want to know."

What's a CMS/Blog engine creator to do? I let them know. So I perused the WLW feedback forum and told Microsoft I'd like to work with the WLW team to get it to work with Vine Type, but the markup that WLW churns out is not XHTML compliant. Microsoft's reply was that XHTML compliance was not a goal for this release. That's right. Not a goal.

So someone set me straight - do you think Web Standards are important to Microsoft or not? Or is that something they say just when Eric, Molly, Dave, and Andy are in the audience?

Comments

Again, there's the question: does Microsoft care, or the IE team? For the former, not really, nor would I expect them to, honestly. But for the latter, the IE team, I know they care. They're one small part of Microsoft, but they're the part I have to worry about the most.

Eric Meyer 10 Oct 2006

I'm curious why you would expect them not to care about web standards. What will happen when the XHTML-compliant Web Expression website is launched and allows Windows Live Writer to pollute the website content repository? I would think this would be percieved negatively by the Web Expressions team. One bad apple...reflects on the company as a whole.

Carl Camera 10 Oct 2006