Oh, happy day!

Ah well. My Slashdot feed is set to update every two hours, so I guess I'm a bit behind :)

Let's wait to see how compliant it is before we celebrate.

IE7 too was advertised as standards-compliant after all, and we know how well that turned out. Acid2 isn't a panacea, but it is better than nothing.

Well, turning a pile of steaming code into a standards-compliant browser is no easy task, so it's going to take them some time to get everything working. But at least they're committing to it, which is really good.

They've been committing to lots of things for a very long time. Including for example, committing to telling me where the heck are my Windows Vista Ultimate extras for the past 14 months. Or for example, committing to complying with a court decision and then becoming the first company in the history of the European Union to be slapped with a fine for noncompliance. Or, to use a germane example, committing as they did repeatedly in 2004, 2005 and 2006 to a standards compliant IE7 - and look where it has got us.

I call BS on this clearly PR move (c.f.: Opera's lawsuit in Europe against Microsoft). At most they'll add a half dozen CSS features they omitted, slap on some poor XHTML 1.1 support and call it standards compliant. Look at this if you want the whole sad story.

Don't believe Microsoft until it's already happened; "commitments" is a marketing term at Microsoft, not a legal one. Besides, Kats, when have you really defended Microsoft before? So who are you and what have you done with the real Kats? :)

It might just turn out to be a PR move, but somehow I don't think they'll about-face *again*. Anyhow, here's another interesting point that makes sense: the mobile web.

They've done it time and again. RTM candidate not stable and secure enough? Just wait till the next service pack, it'll be secure and stable! SP not stable and secure enough? Just buy the next version, it'll be secure and stable! Yeah, right - and pigs can fly.

As for the mobile web argument... Interesting, but ultimately irrelevant. The fact is that Trident is too massive to even consider porting to a mobile platform, unless it's a MID or a UMPC form factor with a beefy processor, lots of RAM and so on; essentially a small-ified version of your regular 100% IBM compatible PC. I doubt it can ever fit in the memory and processing requirements of an ARM-based device, though... you never know. So I doubt it's being made standards-compliant because of the mobile web; more likely, it's a fringe benefit.

Also, speaking as a new iPhone user, I can tell you one of the more interesting upshots of all of this mobile web interest is that now when the devices finally have enough computing power to handle the web in its unadulterated glory, we finally have mobile websites! It's enough to make your brain spin.

I think that should be quoted out of context gratuitously often