I am an advocate for web standards. There are some who are standards fanatics and come the revolution anyone caught using Internet Explorer will be shot at dawn.

There are others who suggest that standards are a waste of time, and in reality, Microsoft has the lion’s share of the market, so they, rather than W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, set the standard.

Personally, I am a practical advocate of standards. If I am building a page and it doesn’t render properly the first thing I do is validate the markup. If you build to standards then it is easier to find out problems. The second reason I try to be standards compliant is because it makes it easier to build accessible pages. And the third reason is that, I am a computer programmer. I am used to building things according to the specs. As a programmer I am also used to the specs being a lot of rubbish and in no way representing the desires of the users, but that is another matter.

Those, to me, are reason enough, to build web sites according to the standards, or recommendations as they call them, of the W3C. And like everyone else who designs according to those standards I have problems with Internet Explorer. Every designer knows the scenario. You build a page, test it in Firefox or Mozilla or Opera or Safari if you are on a Mac, and it looks great. You then test it on IE and it looks rubbish. You get up, wander around a bit cursing, put in a hack to fix it, and go on to the next stage. And the same thing happens. Over and over again.

I work at home and so my wife gets to see and hear the frustration and mounting anger as I condemn Microsoft to seven eternities in hell. By now she knows that IE is a bad browser, it is broken. She knows that Firefox is better. But which browser does she use? You guessed it. Internet Explorer.

I could have installed Firefox on her computer but intentionally I didn’t. Everything else on her PC is there because I installed it. My wife is an intelligent woman. She could install all her own software but she takes the view that she doesn’t need to, I will do it for her. But I didn’t install Firefox. I was waiting to see how long it would be before she realised that her browser needed changing. She knows I use Firefox, and she knows why, I have told her often enough. But she doesn’t feel the need to change. Why should she? IE works well enough.

And therein lies the problem. If people who know that there is a better browser out there won’t change, what hope is there for more standards compliance. Some of them might say that they know that Firefox is better but they couldn’t be bothered. In my wife’s case she doesn’t have to bother. All she has to do is ask. And she has asked me to install plenty of other software.

I think for most people, changing to a standards compliant browser is a tenth order issue, its importance rating is practically zero. And as long as users won’t change designers have to continue to build sites that work in all browsers. And while we do that we perpetuate the users’ reluctance to change. And so the circle goes round.

Is there any chance of change? Will standards compliant browsers ever have market dominance? I fear the answer is no. Rather sad, isn’t it?