When you develop a commercial website, you have to ensure it can be viewed on the widest range of browsers possible - you wouldn't own a shop and prevent 5% of your customers from walking through the door. Likewise, it doesn't make sense to have a website that makes it difficult or impossible for certain browsers to view.

This is where Web Standards come in. Web Standards are a set of guidelines intended to standardize how websites ought to be coded by developers, and how that code is displayed within a web browser. It sounds boring and geeky, but the bottom line is that these standards are needed to ensure YOUR customer can see your website correctly, regardless of the browser they're using.

That's the theory, anyway.

The reality is that many browsers aren't as 'standards compliant' as they should be - forcing Door4 and every other web developer on the planet to spend precious development time coding workarounds to deal with unusual browser behaviour. The emergence in recent years of browsers that are fairly standards-compliant, such as Firefox, Opera and Safari, has led the market-leader, Microsoft, to raise its game and turn its attention to making sure future versions of Internet Explorer comply with Web Standards a bit better than the previous ones...

The latest version of Internet Explorer currently under development, IE8, has just gone 'RC1' - geek terminology for 'Release Candidate 1'. Meaning if no further bugs are found during testing, the browser will be ready to be released.

Microsoft appears to have paid a great deal of attention to ensure that IE8 is highly standards-compliant, which is fantastic news for web developers, the general public, and anyone who owns a website. Microsoft is to be commended for taking standards-compliance seriously. Its size and dominance of the browser market meant that it could historically afford not to care too much about fixing incorrect browser behaviour - web developers would be forced to adapt to IE's limitations. Microsoft is often criticised, but praise is rightly due for their stance on IE8.

There is a downside. Most people do not upgrade to the latest browser immediately, and some people never upgrade at all. IE7 has been out for over 2 years, yet nearly 20% of Internet Explorer users still use IE6. So Door4 won't be able to discontinue coding IE6 workarounds just yet, but the forthcoming release of IE8 looks to be a great step in the right direction.