I lost track of this conversation (been working on that problem recently. Would be interesting to gain your thoughts and insight if you have a moment: http://groups.google.com/group/llup/browse_thread/thread/c9b8ccee7f4e4dee) and in doing a quick blog round-up, realized I had left this comment so am just now reading your follow-up.

With this disclaimer in mind: You’ve got a very valid point! Any progress on the Yahoo! “call-back”?

I agree with your sentiment. However, when you write “conform to the standard” (in your last paragraph), it is my opinion that this is less than completely accurate or explicit.

Two points:

1. The W3 does not produce *standards*, they produce “specifications and guidelines”. Who or what denotes a particular specification a “standards”?
2. XHTML is just *one* specification. HTML 4.01 is still a current guideline/spec and enjoys the same standing (irt “standardization”) as XHTML afaik. How is one to measure one set of guidelines against another? Is XHTML 1.0 *more* of a “standard” than HTML 4.01?

Regardless, I again express my agreement with your sentiment.

Thanks, with warm regards.

A fork shouldn’t be necessary! Yahoo! answered my mail to say they were “in the process of rolling in XHTML support” which is a very good news IMO.

A part from that, I understand your points but I think that it doesn’t mean that we should accept this attitude! In this specific case, I am not asking to lower the support of Internet Explorer and making sure that applications developed to be conform to the current standards do work with other browsers. That just seems like the right thing to do!

Eric

That said, the market is changing, just not as fast as us geeks would like it to.

Of course, I do recognize your point regarding implementing different document types for different browsers. The problem with this, however, is that most web developers and admins don’t and/or won’t go to the effort of learning how to do this, or why it is important, and therefore force us all to live in a state in which products such as YUI are forced to adhere, once again, to the lowest common denominator for the simple reason of a products adoption rate and related support. If you’re desire is to saturate a market, as opposed to serve the needs of a niche market, you have to design your product around what the practices of the most common web developer and server admin.

While it seems backwards to us, the reality is that the reason IE is the way it is has nothing to do with MSFT not desirous to implement standards that we hacker-types recognize as better. In most cases they recognize them as better as well, but like Yahoo! they are forced to write their software in a way that matches the habits of the more common webdev and admin.

In this regard, if Yahoo! wants to penetrate the webdev market with a product, they have to do so based on the understanding that if they implement more than one way to do something, and one of the other ways requires a particular doc-type setting on the server that goes against what the majority of web servers will serve as the default document type, too many webdevs and admins will simply not make the effort or do not understand how to do what seems trivial to the rest of us, and therefore must play by their rules.

Of course, as I was reminded by Alex Bosworth a while back when I asked him if he knew whether or not Google would accept updates to the AJAXSLT code base from the community, there is an alternative given the fact that the code is OSS — Create a fork.