Weblogs: Web Standards

Part of the meme of Microsoft's .net is that it is based on and built on, and supports open standards. XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI. Even portions of the .net framework are published as open standards (CLI and C#). It surely cannot be difficult for a software company to then produce Web form controls that generate valid HTML or XHTML?

Zeldman has picked this up as a pressing issue for web standards - and considering Zeldman isn't a back-end developer, it must be pretty serious for it to even rate a mention.

This seems to be another instance of Microsoft's lack of interest in supporting open interworking standards. Although I fully expect that the open source competitor Mono to get this right - without needing Microsoft's immense budget.

If the continuing trend from Microsoft is to snub open standards - especially after the Internet Explorer 6 debacle, then it provides yet more proof that developers need to refrain from adopting their technologies, otherwise paying the price of being locked into a proprietary framework that only works on a Windows platform. Unfortunately it is not only the developer that gets locked in, but the end-user too.

Open standards is essential - if only to protect the freedom of web users.

Further reading:

• I Can't Focus: ASP.NET, Server Controls and W3C Compliant Pages

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