heh, all i mean was microsoft had to choose its level of quality, like theres a line to be drawn, they are a business. maybe they are pushing towards 100% but their website is a massive entity using different generations of technologies in pretty much every language. the msdn alone is a few gigs of online content at LEAST. Not just static html files but content stored in databases and html thats generated in code, i shudder at the thought of digging through thousands of lines of old pearl and asp to upgrade it. poor bastards.

i did a few other sites, even sun.com had errors, heh thats a good tool to have though, im going to get my next project to be 100%

p.s your new design is wicked

So basically, what you're saying is… Microsoft don't give a shit about the quality of their product. Only that it works. Not that it works well… that it works. Regardless of their seemingly endless budget.

They're only #1 because they have money – and the only place they come in first is when you're talking dollars. Sooooo…

And again, it's not just the fact that it doesn't validate. Most importantly, it appears different across browsers and platforms. = lame!

And lastly, it's hard to trust a company to produce good software when they can't even handle creating a good website. I mean, HTML has got to be the easiest language out there.

PS. What are you using when you post comments? It's creating illegal characters and fucking up my perfect code! haha…

Microsoft has a massive amount of content on many sites, which have been around for years. How long have these standards been around?

Where would they draw the line on how valid their html is? Maybe having all of their content perfectly valid would cost them an extra 500,000k a year in man hours.. But is anyone screaming at them for it? I know the “good enough� strategy seems cheap and they *should* be the ones going all out.. But that’s not their strategy and it never has been. And it’s their “ready, fire, aim� strategy that’s gotten them to #1.

I agree IE sucks and I’m moving away from it too, and they are fixing that because it’s affecting their bottom line. Now if people were up and arms over those 25 html errors I’m pretty sure they’d disappear.

But then again maybe I’m a little biased over here seeing as Microsoft pays my rent:)

It's one thing that it doesn't validate – it's another that it displays completely different in any browser aside from IE. If you're not going to make a valid website, you can at least check it in other browsers and make sure it displays correctly.

The fact that they make and sell software that creates produces shitty code and they also provide every customer with a built in browser (that you can't get rid of, I might add) that doesn't render websites properly is where you lose me. They should be setting the standard, if anything.

That dude's argument that it takes too long to create a valid site. And that time not being worth the effort is BS. You can learn proper code just as easily as you learned half-assed code. I only started producing sites that validate over the past couple months. And it's only been a few months since I first launched a CSS based site. It's not, by any stretch of the imagination, hard to accomplish. I believe, taking the time to learn how to code properly is worth having your site accessible by a wider audience and having it display properly across the board.

Microsoft doesn’t make money by writing code or html, they make money by selling software. It’s a business decision; it’s about the bottom line. Does a website with 25 html errors still sell software? I guess some exec there made the decision that yes, it does.

Building a better mouse trap only catches more mice, it doesn’t sell more mouse traps.

http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2004/04/22.html – this guy says it best.

Now I’m not knocking the value of having a perfectly valid website (I’m sure mines a cesspool of errors, but it got me a job at a Microsoft partner) I’m just explaining the difference between your business (to design web sites) and their business (to sell software).