Interoperability Means More Than Just Standards - from the IE Blog

[tedster]

I found this blog article about IE9 to be a technical but fascinating look at the challenges involved in setting and supporting standards.

In an ideal world, a standards specification is the complete story...

In the real world of the web, things are not so clear-cut. Specifications are seldom perfect and sometimes they are intentionally incomplete or ambiguous. Having served as editor for the ES5 specification, I know that there are always issues that don’t get fully resolved. The result is that there are widely implemented and used features that are not defined by any standard specification.

[blogs.msdn.com...]

[koan]

Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera don't seem to have constant existential problems with standards.

[tedster]

This isn't just an IE issue - even though we all appreciate that IE has had more problems than others with supporting standards. I'm a strong devoted Opera user, but it's clear that over the years, Opera has also struggled to incorporate an interoperable version of EMCAScript.

So I didn't post this just to start another "let's bash IE again" thread. We all get it - IE has not done at all well by standards over many years. Instead I thought this was a very thoughtful blog post on the topic of what the challenges are - for ANY browser.

For example, the whole section about getter/setter methods is quite a good read.