And dont talk to me about standards. Standards on paper with a rubber stamp from W3C are fine and good, but, in the real world, though, 'standard' means 'what everyone else does', and thats just a fact of life.

Everyone has their own standards. Nobody is arguing that we should take away the right to choose which standards to support. The argument is that if we do not embrace open standards, and instead either through apathy or indignance embrace proprietary ones just because they are the most prevalent, we will find ourselves locked into serving the whims of whoever developed that particular proprietary standard.

If you don't buy it, well, nobody's stopping you from embracing MSHTML. Just don't claim that supporting it is for the best of the whole community, and especially don't whine when MS locks you out with some proprietary upgrade or license change.

Score:4, Insightful