I belive we have the IE Team on the right track. What team is next?

Marc: You are absolutely right and oh, believe me, we have a list of site woes. We can fix them. And we will. And for the record, I hate the text size on this site so much I scream about it regularly. Hopefully, we can get the issues sorted soon.

However, I do find it ironic that WASP fights against IE-only sites, when its beautifully redesigned site is in fact glitchy in IE.

Every morning, I come to webstandards.org to find the next juicy morsel of standards goodness… and I dread the moment the site loads. I use IE6 at work… I have Firefox installed too, but most often I’m in IE6, as are many who are out there.

When webstandards.org loads up in the default size of my browser window, the Buzz is black. That column drops down below the task force content on the right. If I hit the maximize button on my browser window, voila! The Buzz is back. This issue does not occur in Firefox.

It’s probably a rounding bug or some such thing in the CSS. I’m sure the great minds at WASP could probably fix this issue if someone took a look at it. I’ve send three to four emails without ever hearing a response.

I know IE6 is terrible, yada yada yada, Firefox is a million times better, yada yada yada… but if WASP wants to have credibility on the issue of people making IE-specific sites, then the least WASP could do is make sure that webstandards.org is not a non-IE-specific site. It’s the same thing, except in reverse.

It’s one thing for Malarkey’s site to be intentionally anti-IE with its black and white stylesheet for the non-standard IE browsers. It might annoy me a titch when I browse there in IE and have to switch to Firefox for the full experience, but I get the point. With webstandards.org, it’s not intentional… it’s just a glitch and should be fixed.

Again, I totally agree with what you’re saying, Molly. You’re doing great work (and I happy visit your blog everyday sans problems), and so is WASP. I just wish this glitch would be fixed, and this seemed a good chance to point that out, since I’ve had zero luck with any of the other channels I’ve tried.

Thanks for your time,
Marc

Microsoft is a huge camp and we’re not going to reach every corner, yet. The people we currently deal with may not be the people responsible for making these websites. We need to reach a group of individuals within Microsoft (like the Mac Development Team at Microsoft in their arena) who share our passions and who can influence their peers.

So far Microsoft seems to only be embracing standards-compliance as a necessity of survival rather than because it’s the right thing to do. They still have a long way to go before we’ll trust them to what’s right without us baby sitting them. However, I don’t want to come across completely negative. The steps that Microsoft have made so far have been in the right direction, whatever the reason for them. We have to keep up what we’ve been doing: Support Microsoft and guide them but never grow complacent.