Jay Penney gives us a good write-up as to why web browsing can sometimes be a frustrating experience for those of us who don’t use some flavor of Internet Explorer. My primary browser is Firefox, both at work and at home. It’s mostly ok, but on occasion I’ll hit those sites that render poorly or not at all.

Part of the problem, of course, is that there’s no governing body that ensures web pages are standards-compliant before they’re published on the web. One of the great things about the web, of course, is that anyone (and, it certainly seems, everyone) can publish something. And it’s one of the great drawbacks as well. Someone will inevitably end up accidentally taking advantage of a bug or two in a popular browser, and then poof, you’ve got a bug that’s become part of the standard. They euphemistically call it “quirks” mode, but we all know it’s “render this as though you’re a buggy browser” mode.

The fix would probably have to be something along the lines of an html validator that gives pages a certificate indicating they’re compliant or not. Existing non-compliant pages would get a non-compliance cert, but they’d be grandfathered in to allow them to render. No new non-compliance certs would be given out. Browsers would refuse to render pages without certs (with some mechanism for design and development pages being allowed anyway).

Also, I want a million billion dollars.