Standards Schmandards

[Regarding the "Home Page" column, January 1999.] It would be nice if the Web Standards Project could succeed where others have failed...but I'm not betting on it.

I was one of the first to sign the Web Interoperability Pledge, run by Ziff-Davis' Jesse Berst from his Anchordesk site. (Jesse also sponsored an equally fruitless effort to get software manufacturers to offer warranties on their products.) I joined Rick Ross' Java Lobby, which was unable to do what Sun could in a court of law-force Microsoft to recognize that there is only one Java.

And as long as professional publications (including yours) continue to rave about all the "new features" (CSS2, XSL, various plug-ins) while ignoring the lack of support for accepted standards (HTML 4, CSS1, DHTML) that are present in today's browsing and authoring tools, then we can expect more of the same for a good long time.<>