I recently finished upgrading my home page to take advantage of one of the newer innovations in web design, cascading style sheets. Cascading style sheets have actually been around for a long time, if you count time in web years. The rationale for CSS is to relieve HTML from being a design tool, a purpose for which it is poorly suited. The HyperText Markup Language was designed to provide authors a way of marking their documents to provide their readers an outline (e.g. <H1><H2><H3>) and anchors to other relevant documents and sources. The server would publish these documents and the end user's browser would render the pages.
As web publishing of documents moved out of the physics lab and with the development of Mosaic (an early graphical browser whose code serves as the ground floor for both Netscape and Microsoft), designers moved into the field and wanted more flexibility in creating a more artistic interface and more control over the display of their creations. In response Netscape started to develop extensions to HTML which would only properly display in their browser, Netscape Navigator. Small firms also started to develop the first WYSIWYG page editors. Of course these products had problems because what the end user gets is determined by the browser used and these inconsistencies led to pages being unreadable or unbearable for some of their target audience.
At about this time in web history, Microsoft joined the fray and bought the WYSIWYG HTML editor FrontPage and licensed the code from Spyglass for Mosaic. Competition between Microsoft and Netscape further fueled the development of proprietary HTML tags and inconsistent viewing for the general public. Both Microsoft and Netscape stated that they were only furthering the capabilities of HTML which their end users wanted and that they couldn't wait for specifications to be developed by a bunch of long-haired anti-commercial net-god wannabes. And although both Microsoft and Netscape were part of the World Wide Web consortium (the W3C), they continued to press on with their proprietary solutions rather than implement the standards. Thus the HTML 3.0 spec died an embarrassing death from neglect. Although it provided a richer implementation of HTML the 3.0 spec was supplanted by the HTML 3.2 spec, which codified more of the proprietary solutions from Netscape and Microsoft and dropped those things which neither Microsoft or Netscape wanted to implement in their browsers.
This brings us to the present day. The W3C has issued the HTML 4.0 spec and specifications, recommendations, and drafts for cascading style sheets, eXtensible Markup Language, metadata, and recently privacy. The HTML 4.0 specification is supposed to provide a univeral markup language that would defer to tools better suited to provide presentational information. CSS1 was supposed the provide for greater flexibility in layout and CSS2 provides even greater flexibility to designers. The RDF draft will help unify the production of metadata for the indexing of the web. XML will provide for the creation of web pages, where the markup will be extended with tags and attributes best suited to the content but will still be able to be parsed by all browsers. And the recent privacy draft will provide a unified framework for the collection of personal data from web browsers as they pass through web sites.
These are innovations which have been agreed upon by both Netscape and Microsoft as part of the W3C, neither has fully implemented these major advances. Only Opera and Netscape's Mozilla project have announced a reliable timetable for the shipment of browsers which will fully parse HTML 4.0 and CSS2. Microsoft has not. As their contracts with ISPs demonstrate, Microsoft is far more concerned in differentiating their products through incompatabilities than providing the browsing public with innovation.
A second demonstration of this is the issue of fonts on the web. Netscape has worked with one of the major font developers, Bitstream, on a method for the dynamic download of fonts to browsers providing designers with a universal solution that was more bandwidth friendly. I accidentally discovered Microsoft's solution by examinig the installation of Internet Explorer and the design of the Microsoft home pages. I recently bought a new Apple G3 and discovered that the system had quite a few more fonts installed than normal. When I installed Internet Explorer 4.0, I discovered where the fonts had come from. One might think that is very magnaminous of Microsoft, but when I started to examine the source for Bill Gates' editorial in the Wall Street Journal I discovered that these were the fonts that the Microsoft web developers had chosen. One software company had chosen to work with a major 3rd party on a universal solution and the other has increased the RAM requirements of my system to satisfy the requirements of their design team.
So when Bill Gates' tells the world that he wants to provide the world with the product that they have asked for, let us tell him that he needs to innovate his products to implement what the net community has asked for and that he needs to innovate his contracts with ISPs and market channel providers of hardware and software to better allow them to give us what we, the informed consumer, want.