[fryke]

Then again, there's a fine line between things. Often. For example: Standards are good. They enable a common ground. But without moving off of old paths, there's no evolution. And why leave all evolution to standards organisations. So you develop something new. It's good. You want to push it towards a standard. It doesn't get accepted. Now what? Kill the product or let it live and thrive?
I'm personally not a fan of Flash-based sites, but without Macromedia, vector content would maybe never (or much later) have found its way into webpages.

Don't get me wrong: I agree that it would be better for the world if Microsoft _had_ that corporate responsibility thing. The way they entered this market (web browsers) however, it wasn't really expected, was it. Then again, at the time, IE 5 for the Mac was the most standards compatible browser ever. And stayed so for quite some time. That it was also a bridge to those pages that could only be viewed in IE for the PC before is also something that the Mac crowd actually welcomed.

I still think that as a web developer you just don't have much choice. You either close out a lot of people or have to base your work on older standards that are supported by more than 90 percent of active browsers. (Although there probably _are_ still people using Netscape 4.78 on Macs running OS 9 - or [gasp!] Mac OS 8.61...)