"Rather than having a corporate standard for browsers - which, frankly, is what led us into this mess - it would be better for browsers themselves to comply with some external standard - then any application developed to the external standard will work, no matter which browser you use. Yes, I know that browsers are supposed to comply to standards today, but perhaps an independent organization could certify compliance? Or is there already a certification body doing this?" - John E. Bredehoft

There isn't a body that determines UA compliance, and none of the major parties would ever agree to such a body. One thing developers and some web designers have been doing is testing for capability (rather than browser), which abstracts progressive enhancement to allow for cases when a browser eventually implements a feature. The jQuery library, for the most part, is one example of this (A List Apart article on it: http://www.alistapart.com/article...). - Mark Trapp

One offset of this are tools to test compatibility, which could, in theory, be used for compatibility policy. The famous example of this is the ACID test: you could always require a browser that has at least 90% on it. - Mark Trapp

What about W3C? - Ian May

Ian, W3C is a recommendation body, not an enforcement body. They make recommendations for standards, and it's up to each UA to decide if they will support the standard and how much they will support it. There are also working groups like WHAT-WG that try to build consensus among the big UA players, but members can join and leave at will, or decide to go on their own (most recently, Firefox decided to go against the WHAT-WG on HTML5 and use Ogg as the standard codec for video and audio containers). - Mark Trapp

Another issue with W3C et al recommendations is that they are subject to interpretation; Joel Spolsky had a great article about this last year: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items... - Mark Trapp

See my follow-up post http://empoprise-bi.blogspot.com/2009... - John E. Bredehoft

Mark: regarding "Firefox decided to go against the WHAT-WG on HTML5 and use Ogg", the HTML5 spec doesn't say people can't use or implement Ogg. In fact it doesn't currently list a codec at all. The Firefox devs are quite justified in their use of Ogg (it's not clear that there is another codec they could use, in fact) and if they manage to make it a popular codec, then maybe other groups will be more willing to implement it, at which point maybe HTML5 can require Ogg Theora again. - Ian Hickson

Ian, I defer to your superior knowledge on the issue (if I have it right, Ian Hickson is the author/editor/maintainer of the HTML5 spec and the ACID2/3 tests, among other standards); it seemed like there was consensus that there ought to be a baseline codec support for all UAs, but Apple and Nokia were unlikely to ever accept Ogg Theora format, which would seem like Firefox is going against consensus for a single baseline codec by adopting it. - Mark Trapp

There's consensus that there ought to be a baseline codec support for all UAs, and there is skepticism that Ogg Theora should be it. However, there's no suitable codec right now, so whatever codec Firefox supported would be against consensus. :-) In practice, the problem with Theora is the risk of submarine patents -- so the more it is used, the more companies expose themselves to patent trolls by implementing Theora, the more like it is that other companies will follow and implement it. So Firefox helps. - Ian Hickson