December 13th, 2007
Opera Files Complaint
Håkon Wium Lie posted an open letter in which is revealed that Opera has filed a formal complaint with the European Commission to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in its browser Internet Explorer.
Over the years I have been an active participant in the ongoing fight for open and interoperable Web standards. I have always opposed those who would force proprietary technologies where open alternatives, often superior, exist. From 1994, I worked at CERN and W3C to help make sure there were good specifications for the Web. In 1999, I joined Opera to make sure there was at least one browser that implemented those specifications right. We have worked hard to do that. Unfortunately Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the biggest browser of all, did not.
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A welcome move in my opinion, Internet Explorer has proved time and time again that it is counterproductive to Web designers and developers.
Instead of nice clean semantic coding we have had to add hacks to get things to display correctly in IE and many people have had enough (some even calling for a boycott of developing sites in IE).
So if this moves succeeds and forces Microsoft to support standards this will have a positive effect on the developer/designer community. Microsoft has always baffled me with their persistence in doing their own thing instead of including existing standards and helping things progress, would it not make more sense to support these standards and have people like your products than go against the grain and fuel the growing anti-Microsoft sentiment that is going on?