"Microsoft has a unique position - "

"It's a lot more difficult for the competition," "

And guess what. That's how they like it. They'll play the whinny "We're just a software company, why are you picking on us" routine when it suits them as well.

Incidently I hear of no migration tools so that the web sites crippled to work with Microsoft's botched implementation can be converted to a standards compliant version. But for those that don't make heavy use of server side VBscript (or rather the MS specific bits of what is generically ECMAscript) that might be just the push they need to dump IIS and go Apache.

Otherwise what's the option. A new 3 way code test. MS old, MS new and everyone else?

MS can spin the dual rendering engines as being the right thing for them to do regarding the older web sites. "We don't force the customer to upgrade their browser, they have a free choice."

Websites can continue running without even needing to politely warn that you have a non compliant browser. Giving no incentive for anyone to shift.

In other words. The barely minimum level of acceptance.

If I sound unimpressed remember that a sizeable chunk of MS software is for development. Writing a parser for a compiler or interpreter to read a grammar (For HTML pages and CSS definitions) *properly* should be well within their capabilities.*

Enfold,extend, extinguish will still be their preferred idea of standards compliance.

*Unless they dumped on some Summer intern to do of course.