Snarky snarky.

This post is about me. Please do not post comments about Microsoft’s behavior in response to this post.  This isn't a troll for congratulations or thanks, either.

I stopped replying to the comments in the last post.  Not because I stopped reading them, but because I realized that I needed to step back, because the (intentional or not) trolls really were luring me in, and I realized I have tended to sound extra snarky occasionally on my own blog.

There's a lot of anger aimed at Microsoft, in particular around IE.  A lot of it comes out in comments, here and in the IEBlog.  A lot of the frustration behind it is certainly justified, though being frustrated at me personally is not. I try very hard never to take it personally, and usually succeed.  I occasionally let blatant inaccuracies piss me off, and then I can get pretty pissy in tone in reply.  (The inaccuracies are frequently the result of anti-Microsoft sentiment to begin with, compounded with the last five years of web browser non-feature-development.) Too many people read that as “typical Microsoft arrogance”, which frankly pisses me off all the more, because I’ve personally railed against Microsoft arrogance for longer than most of you have been involved in the web. (Yes, really. I started working on IE in 1995. I know many of you were working on the web prior to that, but I doubt the majority were.)

A few months ago, Molly posted a piece on internal vs. external standards evangelism.  I thought it was great, in part because I am perhaps the alpha internal standards evangelist.  Few of you believe it - occasionally, someone who knows me really well does - but I actually believe in open standards.  Real open standards.  The ones built by a group of people with an interest in making the world better, not just in their own private vested interests. I’ve championed that in one way or another since I joined Microsoft, and I continue to do so today. It’s been a hard road, but not one I can imagine myself not choosing to walk down. It’s been gratifying to me over the past couple of years to see my championing pay off in the change of direction in Microsoft. It’s been frustrating, though, to be continually identified as the personal screw-up responsible for IE not supporting more standards today, when it's actually because of my personal influence that CSS is IMPLEMENTED in IE. 

What has frustrated me the most has been the uninformed or unrealistic comments. I don’t like my team being called lazy, for example; I don’t like being told my team is “[finding] excuses for not making other improvements.” We’re not looking for excuses; we’ve done the best we can in IE7 given the limitations of time and space. Everything is a tradeoff – look at the progress of the Firefox 2.0 project and I think you’ll see that project management is not that simple.

At any rate. For being snarkier than I should have been, my sincere apologies.