Martian Headsets

A must-read from Joel Spolsky on the travails of conforming to "standards".  Here's an excerpt, in which Joel is discussing Microsoft's recent decision to make IE8 conform strictly to W3C standards:

I looked at my watch.

Tick, tick, tick.

Within a matter of seconds, you started to see people on the forums showing up like this one:

I have downloaded IE 8 and with it some bugs. Some of my websites like “HP” are very difficult to read as the whole page is very very small… The speed of my Internet has also been reduced on some occasions. Whe I use Google Maps, there are overlays everywhere, enough so it makes it ackward to use!

Mmhmm. All you smug idealists are laughing at this newbie/idjit. The consumer is not an idiot. She’s your wife. So stop laughing.

Entertaining and interesting.  Go read it.