DeeEmm; agreed, everything should be up to the standard, which wasn't created to be optional, and is there for very solid reasons.

To pick up from your example of the gas appliance, and to tie it up with what I'm on about, imagine this scenario:

50% of houses on the current market have not been built to work properly with standard gas appliances. You are a gas appliance manufacturer, and have loads of retailers and workshops who buy the goods from you and take care of installing the said appliances. see more Can you, as the appliance manufacturer, just make your appliances to the standard only, and then quote the standard and tell the retailers and workshops to tweak it up from there onward? That would obviously pose a major problem, and cause countless headaches for everyone. People less aware of the standards would blame you for producing faulty appliances that don't work in your house, and retailers would blame you for not providing an appliance that's easy to fit in. With all your love for the standards and understanding of their importance, you would be quite inclined to provide solutions that stray from the ideal as little as possible, while working without a hitch across the current houses on the market.

My attempt towards a solution is launching a massive multi-level campaign to bring down the amount of "bad houses" (bad browsers), starting up in the course of April / May at -> http://stopie7.com -- just a splash page at the moment. Anyone interested in participating in the effort is welcome to contact me for more information. I intend to see through a global rally of web developers united in furthering an environment where web technologies can be deployed the way they were intended, without having to put up with all this crap (thanks Microsoft). Rally on far and wide and loud as long as IE6 and IE7 are marginalized, both mass media and grassroots level.

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