I’m interested how you view Microsoft’s role in all this. Obviously their lack of real (as opposed to simply verbal) support for web standards is well documented, and painfully evident in their products, a situation that gives less conscientous developers the perfect excuse not to do anything about it.

However, I wonder if the behaviour of products such as .NET and Internet Explorer (6) points to a more general internal MS culture, that is - by and large - simply not concerned with the promotion and use of web standards, and naturally extends to .NET developers through training, conferences, blogs, and so forth.

You mentioned PHP and Ruby, which are both open source products, and as such probably have a more diverse set of people contributing both to the product itself, and the community as a whole.

Perhaps this increased diversity results in PHP and Ruby developers having a greater awareness of issues outside of their own little clique, something that the .Netters are lacking.

Thoughts?

Ok, you could argue that .Net doesn’t produce valid code out of the box, however in .Net 2.0 that has changed. Also the beauty of .Net is that you can write your own components that do validate. I have used .Net for a few years now and I’ve personally managed to work with it’s shortcomings and produced sites that validate to the W3C XHTML 1.1 specification. Yes that means I’ve had to put a little extra work in initially, but now I’ve got a series of validating components I just plug them into all the sites we produce at the White Agency.

Yes, Microsoft have been very slow on the uptake of standards, however, hopefully they are looking to change this with taking on Molly Holzschlag. This might be a long road, but at least it’s a step in the right direction and clearly after years of moaning to Microsoft about web standards they are finally starting to listen.

Going back to .Net 2.0, this can now produce XHTML 1.0 valid markup, but you can bet your bottom dollar that isn’t going to stop “web developers” using tables for layout.

developers having a greater awareness of issues outside of their own little clique, something that the .Netters are lacking

I think your last sentence is the most poignant. For some reason .Netters lack the ability to look outside their own little bubble and for the life of me I cannot understand this. Any ideas as to why they don’t look further than the MSDN libraries?

I think the reason developers don’t look further than the MSDN libraries is because they don’t have to. They’re using a product produced by a single company, a company that is very adept at keeping everybody within the insular world they’ve created (not Microsoft bashing, most big companies do this). So, if you’re using MS products, you get MS certified, you read MS manuals (or possibly manuals written by third parties who also happen to be MS certified), and so on and so forth.

You actually have to make a concerted effort to read anything that hasn’t got Microsoft’s fingerprints all over it, which means that what MS consider to be important is what most developers using MS products consider to be important.

If Molly made some dramatic inroads at Microsoft, and the company suddenly started producing standards-adoring software – and the documentation and training to match – you can bet your arse that a lot of these standards-ignorant developers would sit up and take notice (particularly if their “Certified Professional” status depended on it).

Stephen

Getting certified is nothing more that an introduction to .NET and that’s it.

Can’t argue with that, but why is that these developers then stop there? Why don’t they understand that they need to keep learning more especially on the web side of things where technologies etc change at an alarming rate?

Out of the box the .Net 2.0 does have problems, but we are used to overwriting the rendering side of things for .Net 1.1 so it’s really come as a major problem for us. I am currently looking at something completely different though that means you can code in .Net (C# for me) and not use the stupid web forms stuff, including that very annoying ViewState hidden variable. I’d recommend you have a good read about the Castle Project stuff, especially the Monorail and ActiveRecord projects, these really rock (in a very geeky sense). I am currently doing a lot of research into it and thinking about getting my team at the Agency to start using it. It is a MVC framework and is basically like a .Net version of Ruby on Rails. I’m going to be blogging on this stuff soon, but I just want to spend some more time with it first.