This is a comment I left on Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog post Not your father’s standards switch:

Jeffrey, did you really fight this Web Standards battle to give it up so easily?

In 1999 developers used tables (and other cool and hip HTML features, of which you know). Only because they could easily build something that looked and behaved just the way they wanted without too much of an effort.

Now we build with standards. And only because we can easily build websites using standards that look and function as expected in most of the browsers without much of an effort. Except IE, of course. Fortunately we now have enough knowledge to make it behave like standards aware browser with just a few lines of CSS or extra HTML markup which doesn’t hurt anybody.

Finally Microsoft gives us something that doesn’t require a special care — IE 7. Why spoil this great evolution of IE and the Web, and ask for a treat for the upcoming versions?

Every web developer will know about a new version of IE being released by Microsoft, even those who don’t know what Web Standards mean, and those for whom the HTML is generated by a CMS.

Isn’t this the moment we all have been waiting for — the Web dominated by the Standards based websites, and having the quirky ones as a minority.

This is the day when Microsoft should put all their marketing money in an effort of declaring that standards are good. Whether stating that invalid sites make your computer unsafe or using other reasons that could be easily picked up by the general public.