When will Internet Explorer fully support standards?

When I say standards I mean things such as:

http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/ - Box module, positioning, full support for every possible standards compliant implementation, etc
http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/ - ugh
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/PNG/ - Alpha support requires use of a propertory filter, ugh
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/ - support non-existant
http://www.w3.org/P3P/ - ugh

Those are to name a few. It would be nice if Internet Explorer supported these standards and others strictly according to the specification so that webmasters would be able to innovate and create superior webpages rather than serve users of Microsoft Internet Explorer inferior webpages that are bloated with tables that position non-tabular data and display artifacted rasterized images. If Internet Explorer was to fully support these standards a Microsoft Internet Explorer user's user experience on websites that switch over to these standards (as all will eventually do) would greatly improve.

It would also be nice to see any propertory extensions of these standards be tagged so proper standards support is maintained. For example, Mozilla's extensions to the CSS specification have a -moz- prefix so that they do not break proper standards support.

I'd like to know as well, if there are any plans to do this.

But I'll also defend IE in this, when you code your site strictly to w3c standards, it has problems in firebird and opera as well, it seems all 3 of them treath CSS differently, lots of fun when you're a webdesigner

Serving different css files according to their user agent (and then smart ppl put IE as user agent while they are using mozilla..., yes it has good reasons, but I hate it), or playing around with your css files to find some compromise between all of them

I am not attacking Internet Explorer (I defend it in discussions), I am merely letting Microsoft know how badily Internet Explorer is lacking in the standards department.

I am aware that all CSS parsers are different but when working on a template the last thing that should be in my mind is "how do I work around <insert browser here>'s broken standards support."

Internet Explorer's engine's standards support makes innovation impossible.

(Don't get me wrong, never said you were attacking it )

From what I understand, thousands of applications other than IE rely on its engine so that implementing support for CSS might break existing applications. I'd prefer breaking existing applications (quirks mode should still render most of them perfectly) that were coded for IE's nonstandard standards engine in orer to do things the way that they should have been done in the first place.

There is this wonderful browser called Mozilla Firefox it never gives me any problem, and if  I want to add anything , I write the program(plug-in) myself. If IE could just take a hint from Mozilla, I would easily switch back. Also with the way things are on the internet securitywise, its good to be a little different that 90% of the computers in the world.

P.S. tabbed browsing is the future, get on the train.

I only use IE when I have to....I mostly use Firefox because of the options IE doesn't have like tabbed browsing simple popup blocking and themes..

Makes you wonder if it would just be easier to drop IE and support Mozilla.  Its great already, and would make both MS's life easier as well as Mozilla if they had the support.  Now, Im not one of those Open Source freaks that preaches OSS everywhere.  If Mozilla was closed, I would still recommend it.  At this point, IE is very far behind the game, and playing catch-up could be costly to MS.  Programmers that could be better used elsewhere.

Anyhow, thats my slant on things.

I don't think that modern web design can progress until Internet Explorer improves in standards support, IE hasn't changed much since 4.x and most web design enhancements (like CSS2, Alpha-transparent PNGs) have been blocked from being common until IE can support it.

Simon and Shining, I've started up a ProductFeedback wiki page just for Internet Explorer, and populated it with some of your comments - please expand on them (or delete them, if you don't want them preserved for posterity and/or our devs!) as you see fit.  Read more about it here.

jonathanh wrote:

Simon and Shining, I've started up a ProductFeedback wiki page just for Internet Explorer, and populated it with some of your comments - please expand on them (or delete them, if you don't want them preserved for posterity and/or our devs!) as you see fit.  Read more about it here.

wow a feedback wikki good idea