I ran into this little article earlier today on Neowin, and I couldn't help myself.

It does not matter who you are, you can point your finger at Microsoft and place blame for anything! I’m not surprised, really; we’re in a “blame Microsoft” mode. If company X cannot build a product superior to a competing MS product, it is obviously MS’ fault.

I agree that because of older browsers, we see many web sites with malformed HTML, but it is a stretch to place the blame solely on MS’ shoulders. I remember Netscape did the same thing back in 4.x days. Back then, I was thankful for it.

The fact of the matter is, the Internet that we know exists only because the average user embraced the Web to find and share information. These people cared nothing of properly formatted tags or making sure every tag was closed in its proper place (they really didn’t need to). All they wanted was a site that they could share their information on (whatever that may be). It is these people that we really owe for our Internet. They helped build it; they made it popular.

I remember my first site. I had no idea what these tag thingies were. All I knew was that I could change the background color of the page, set default fonts for the page, and add these really cool 3Dish borders around text and pictures. My very first site had well over 3 body tags (1 for the body, 1 for the background color, 1 for the fonts, and who else knows what else). Did I close them all? Nope, but IE 4 and NS 4 displayed them. I was happy. I had no knowledge of HTML (a fault which I later rectified), but my information was available to those that wanted it.

I guess the irony of it all is Mr. Hyatt’s own site does not live up to XHTML standards (nor does Apple’s Safari site). According to Mr. Hyatt's own logic, these two sites should not be accessible until the markup is perfect. Bleh.