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The standards are there for a reason (interoperability), so following them makes sense even if a browser vendor reasonably thinks it should have been done diffe

The standards are there for a reason (interoperability), so following them makes sense even if a browser vendor reasonably thinks it should have been done differently. If everyone just implemented what they think is best, no standard would be required in the first place. Apart from that, IE6 also had massive rendering bugs and no CSS2 support. They only fixed the worst stuff five years later, with IE7. Of course web developers still had to wrestle IE6 for years after that, as its market share declined only slowly.

arp242 3y ago
In this case, the standard reduced interoperability. As a general point you're correct of course, but you need to consider the context and specific situation. No one implemented standards back then, and IE WAS the de-facto "standard" as it had something like ~98% market share. I'm not saying standards should have been made bug-compatible with IE or even that they should have gone out of their way to accommodate IE, but a "CSS 2.2" cold have updated stuff like the box model which was 1) actually better (or, at the least, equivalent), and 2) a huge pain for everyone. It would have reduced headaches for everyone, and would have been a lot easier than changing every website. Especially non-IE users would have benefited: the people who suffered the most from this weren't the IE users and devs who only cared about IE, they were the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and Opera people and devs who cared about them. One has to wonder if uptake of things like Firefox or Opera wouldn't have been much faster in an alternative universe where these changes were made. Mindlessly following standards just makes no sense. Also see GNU and POSIX_ME_HARDER/POSIXLY_CORRECT.