What about the use of CSS within products of Microsoft?

As a graphic designer I'm not quite sure if I'm at the right place with all you techies, but I'm really wondering what the policy about the use of CSS is within Microsoft.

I'm doing a lot of Sharepoint Projects lately and to be quit honest, the use of css within SPS Portal Server 2003 is a drama, classes declared three times in the same css file, overruling css by hard coded style attributes and so on and so on, on the other hand.. I did see the use of CSS within commerce server which was really neat.

Are there guidelines? Are there plans to follow W3C recommondations?

Thumbs up for the Channel 9 design!

Wasn't there an advertisement saying that Microsoft cleaned up its code? I would think that this would be supposed to be clean as well...

This isn't specifically about CSS, but I found this very interesting about Widbey and "web standards":

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2003/11/25/39620.aspx

Hopefully new controls coming from MS with Widbey will create "valid HTMLmarkup", unlike the current Visual Studio. Throw the calendar control on a page and then view source. It hurts just to look at it.

Well I'm a techie and I've got to agree with you.
 
I've seen some really horrific use of CSS that show the typical sort of lack of thinking that one associates with amateur junior programming teams.
 
Good CSS design and standardisation should be part of the standards just like naming conventions and programming style rules are. Otherwise things get very messy very quickly and it's a nightmare for anyone having to maintain the site/code.

SharePoint is just one of many examples. Most I've seen on the web have come from so-called "Professional" creative agencies - the ones who say us techies aren't safe enough to be let near the UI because we're not professional designers like they are! Enough said!  

One wonders how often the "prototype knock it together quick in DreamWeaver for a customer demo" version of something is the one that gets launched.