WaSP to Microsoft: Standards Now! (press release)

1000 More Developers Sign Petition (press release)

AN OPEN LETTER TO MICROSOFT:
IT'S TIME TO GET IT RIGHT

Love them, loathe them, or anything in-between, Microsoft is a fact of life, and Microsoft's browser has at least half the market. Now that Netscape has committed to delivering full support for Cascading Style Sheets Level-1, HTML 4.0, DOM 1.0 and XML 1.0 in Navigator 5 – and appears to be on the verge of doing so – it's time to get Microsoft to commit to doing the same.
        If they do this, The Web Standards Project will have largely fulfilled its mission to bring these standards to our medium.
        Unfortunately, Microsoft sounds noncommittal these days when we discuss the concept of "full support" within a reasonable time frame. While Microsoft itself has argued eloquently for common standards when it comes to instant messaging, they don't seem to be showing the same passion when it comes to browsers. It's two steps forward, one step back.
        We don't want to take that one step back. We need your help to convince Microsoft that working developers are serious about full compliance with key Web standards. Specifically, we need to act now so that Microsoft will take the issue seriously EARLY in the development cycle for the next release of Internet Explorer. We'd rather raise our voices now (and get results) than complain later.
        We've written a letter (right) outlining our position. The more of you who send it to Microsoft, the bigger the dent we can make in their reticence to commit to full standards compliance, and the likelier we are to have fully standards-compliant browsers in this lifetime.
        Please join us by signing your name to the letter below, and sending it to standardsnowwebstandards.org. We'll take it from there.
        Thank you!

The Web Standards Project Steering Committee
George Olsen, Project Leader
Jeffrey Zeldman, Site Designer
Tim Bray
Steve Champeon
Rachel Cox
B.K. DeLong
Martin Diekhoff
Chris Kaminski
Dan Shafer
Dori Smith
Jeffrey Veen

THE LETTER
Please cut and paste the letter below, sign, and mail to: standardsnowwebstandards.org.

A text version of this letter is also available if your browser has trouble cutting and pasting styled CSS text.

As a member of the Web Standards Project and a working developer building Web sites, I am writing to ask that Microsoft take the next logical step in its support for W3C standards, and deliver full (100%) support for Cascading Style Sheets Level-1, HTML 4.0, DOM 1.0 and XML 1.0 in the next version of Internet Explorer.

Full support of these standards will enable developers and designers to finally embrace this technology, which Microsoft helped create, and which Microsoft was the first to begin supporting. Less than full support in Internet Explorer would be a bad marketing decision when its largest competitor delivers the goods.

(Microsoft's support for these standards has been far superior to Netscape's, but that will change when Netscape releases Navigator 5.0, which WILL offer 100% support for these standards, according to independent reports.)

For the good of your browser and the advancement of the Web as a great medium for communications, commerce, and art, I urge you to go the distance and make full support for these standards a priority for your Internet Explorer development team. If you cannot commit to that time frame, I'd like to know when when Microsoft DOES plan to deliver full support for these standards. (If the answer is "never," I'd like to know that, too, so I can let my clients and site visitors know that standards-compliant sites may not work properly on Internet Explorer.)

Sincerely,

(YOUR NAME),
The Web Standards Project