Is Microsoft really committed to web standards?

For the past year or so there has been quite lot of buzz about Microsoft’s new committment to web standards. They’ve talked about it on their blog, they’ve upgraded support in IE 7, and even released a new suite of standards compliant development tools. One of their employees has been named interim chair of the W3C HTML working group. Today eminent web standards evangelist Molly Holzschlag announced that she has been hired by Microsoft to consult on web standards.

By all appearances, they have changed their ways. Microsoft is now committed to web standards and working together with web developers. We can move on and embrace this new relationship. Some web developers really believe this.

But can we really? Have they really changed their ways for good? Can we trust them now? I’m skeptical. Given past history, we can’t assume that Microsoft is as committed as they say they are. Maybe they are, I don’t know. For now, anyway. They could just be doing this as long as they are lagging behind in the market. When they get back on top this committment could be thrown out the window once again. All of this is rather sudden after all.

Pamela Jones has a great analogy in an article on Microsoft’s OOXML. In the section entitled “Philanderer’s Promises”, she compares Microsoft to a philandering ladies man. The woman falls in love with him because he’s so charming and all, despite what she’s heard about him. He promises over and over that he’s a changed man, he loves her so much and all that other stuff was all in the past. The woman believes him and they end up getting married.

Now, I believe in the regenerative power of love as much as the next guy, but it has always seemed to me that you can predict a guy’s future conduct by prior behaviour in 99% of all cases.

So it’s not long before the man is back to his old ways. Microsoft could be doing the exact same thing to developers now. If they have us convinced that they are committed to web standards, and we naively believe them, then they are free to do as they like without scrutiny.

Liam also pointed out that although Microsoft seems to be on board with web standards, they are clearly not when it comes to other issues, such as the open XML format Ms. Jones wrote about. In addition, Vista includes a new markup language called XAML. If Microsoft is clearly not interested in other standards, then are they really interested in web standards?

Microsoft and the IE development team have made a lot of significant changes. Things are certainly much better than they were even a year ago. Maybe they have changed, I don’t know. I do know that given past history and their work in other areas we should not take these claims at face value. We have to keep holding them to account to ensure that the web continues to move forward.

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