Remember the other day when I said I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the security providers join forces for the greater good?

Sophos' Graham Cluely has this morning announced the formation of the Industry Connections Security Group under the umbrella of the IEEE Standards Association's Industry Connections program. Initially the group includes Sophos, Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee, AVG, and Trend Micro.

While Cluely states that the security providers shared information in the past, he adds that it's been in a mostly "Here's a truckload of new malware samples, enjoy!" kind of way. One of the primary objectives of the ICSG is to standardize how information is shared and to develop "an electronic delivery mechanism that not only shares the malware samples, but can also include useful information such as the website where the samples were found."

The IEEE's ICSG website notes that while the bad guys have been doing this for ages - sharing toolkits and other code freely - the security providers have mostly been operating in isolation.

Now that they're organizing, here's hoping the collaboration can make a difference in the battle against malware.

There's a minor uproar happening on Twitter over Microsoft's plans to continue using Word to render HTML email in Outlook 2010. Fixoutlook.org reports that nearly 8,000 people have signed a petition via Twitter to encourage Microsoft to change its mind and support web standards before the new version of Office leaves beta. To back up its claims, the site links to an HTML email message rendered in Outlook 2000, and the same message in Outlook 2010: the new version looks a whole a lot worse.

By sticking with Word's rendering engine, which Microsoft started using to render email in Outlook 2007, Microsoft would also be sticking designers with outdated font tags and tables, instead of the latest CSS hotness. According to The Email Standards Project, Microsoft's reason for doing this is to allow Outlook users to use Word's prepackaged design tools and email templates, and have those render correctly for other Outlook users. Microsoft itself is worried that rendering through a browser could slow performance and lead to inconsistent appearance across different HTML engines.

It's no secret that Internet Explorer has a history of thumbing its nose at web standards. IE8 is supposed to change all that, bringing improved (how could it not be?) compliance. An unfortunate side effect, however, is that some sites that have been designed to display properly in IE7 (or older) don't look so hot in the new version.

I particularly like one excerpt from the IEBlog: Site owners are *always* in control of their content. That's important to remember in case you were thinking the browser had something to do with why a site looks fine in Firefox, Chrome, or Opera but not IE.

How, then, to avoid these problems? Why, with the incompatibility list, of course! Sites added to it will automatically load in "compatibility view," thus providing the average user with a more hiccup-free browsing experience. Trouble is, the list is getting big. Stupid big.

ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reported that the list currently contains 2,400 sites that don't render properly in IE8. Even better is the fact that the list includes some pretty major sites, like Yahoo! and Google. Google? How does a web browser not render Google correctly?

What do you make of the list? What does it say about the state of Internet Explorer and web standards?

Topical addon: The Register has published a post about Norwegian websites banding together to urge users to upgrade from IE6 to a "more compatible" browser so they don't have to hack up their code.

Back in January, Microsoft caused quite a stir when they announced that the default behavior of Internet Explorer 8 would be to render web pages the same way as they are rendered in IE 7. The problem with this? One of IE 8's most touted features is its web standards compliance and its passing of the Acid2 test. However, web developers and standards advocates were miffed at the idea that rendering the "correct" way would require an additional line of code.

Well, it looks like Microsoft is listening. Yesterday they announced that the default browser behavior will be to render according to standards. If sites want to render in the "quirks" mode (thus, look the same as it would look in IE 7), the site maintainers will need to add in a line of code to reflect that.

The rationale from the original decision stems from the problems Microsoft had when migrating from IE 6 to IE 7. IE 7 had to sacrifice standards compliance in order to deal with rendering problems held over from IE 6. Thus, a web page that was built around IE 6's weirdness would look horrendous in IE 7, despite actually being displayed "properly." Thus, Microsoft made the decision to work out a way to render older sites without the appearance of breakage.

By changing course, Microsoft joins other browser makers like Safari, Firefox and Opera is operating with standards compliance out of the box. We have to give Microsoft credit for at least listening to the response from the community.

[via Webware]

As Facebook and Google join DataPortability.org for streamlining the technologies and standards used with social applications, online real estate listings are quick not to be left behind.

In an open letter to Yahoo, Google, Trulia and Zillow, the RETS community (Real Estate Transaction Standard) encouraged a data standard for real estate listings so that home sellers and others who list real estate online can easily take one listing and make it work for all the participating websites. So instead of having to rewrite the listings for each site's particular style of listings, it only has to be written once. How very, oh, web 2.0.

With the speed that data standards are sprinting along, it's only going to be a matter of time until everything (that is useful anyway) has been reduced to standards that allow for maximum compatibility across services. Data standards for other areas such as classifieds, documents, and online personals may be closer than we think. Or maybe that's just a usability lover's pipe dream.

[via Mashable]

It's fairly inarguable that Firefox needs to exist. Going back just a few years ago to when Mozilla introduced what would quickly become their flagship browser, much of the internet was in the equivalent of the digital dark ages. Netscape was struggling along after Internet Explorer had successfully derailed its efforts years ago, but even IE was suffering from a stagnating development process and an industry that was trying to move forward with efforts in standards and compatibility. Sure, Opera was always on the outer fringes, but its market share hasn't really seen much of the leap that its devoted following believes it deserves.

Along comes Firefox in 2004, and everything changes. Netscape drops even farther off the list of many a user, and Internet Explorer begins slowly, but steadily, losing market share to the open source Mozilla alternative that opened up the public's eye to the wonders of extensions and add-ons. It is at this moment in time, however, when Firefox also began to slowly replace Internet Explorer as a dominant and, in some ways, proprietary force on the web.

In 2007, Firefox certainly hasn't destroyed IE's market share, but it sure has made a dent. While that's a positive thing in the name of choice and the triumph of good software, Firefox has quite possibly made a negative impact on the development of web sites and software when viewed in the context of accessibility. Think about it: before Firefox, most websites were not only 'optimized' for IE, you pretty much had to view them in IE if you wanted to see anything more than the equivalent of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle blown apart with a shotgun. Even though it could be argued that web design standards have come quite a ways since then (and they certainly have), the damage done from Firefox's wild popularity among the tech savvy (and even not-so-savvy) primarily lies in this new frontier of web apps and services.

ZDNet's Richard MacManus has conducted an interview with Chris Wilson, the Group Program Manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft to discuss the IE7 standards issues that have popped up lately. Wilson recently posted in his blog about claims concerning IE7's non-compliance, essentially saying that today IE is, indeed, behind on standards, but that there is so far no unbiased test for compliance and many claims have been exaggerated. In his interview, MacManus asks Wilson where Internet Explorer 7 is at today in terms of CSS compliance and where it's headed, and Wilson says, "I don't think we're at 90%, I think we're above 50%." Also discussed is the succession of IE7 over IE6 and the challenges of backwards compatibility with sites built for IE6. Though Wilson's answers won't be entirely satisfying for IE-weary web designers or users, it definitely helps to clarify the situation.

Windows experts and web developers are unhappy with Microsoft. Yes, again. Since Internet Explorer 7 was announced, Microsoft has promised that supporting current web standards was high on its list. It turns out, though, that by at least one report, IE7 will only support 54% of the CSS 2.1 standard, as compared to 52% in IE6 and 93% in Firefox 1.5 and 96% in Opera 9. In addition to making a whole lot of web developers' lives a whole lot more difficult, IE7's lack of standards support is turning off a lot of Microsoft's most vocal fans, including Paul Thurrott, who runs the excellent Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows. In a recent Windows IT Pro column, Thurrott accuses Microsoft of leaving users and web developers in the lurch, concluding "My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It's a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn't secure and isn't standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators." Ouch.

Google, Apple and Dell are among a recent group of companies that have joined the Khronos Group, a developer of the OpenGL graphics standard.

The Khronos Group is funded by members to create open standard royalty free API's that allow playback of dynamic media across a wide array of platforms and devices. Khronos members are from a broad spectrum in the industry, and include many companies from operating system vendors, system and handset OEM's, game developers, application developers, and wireless carriers.

Through their new membership, Google, Apple and Dell will be helping to create new standards, and new market opportunities for the graphic and dynamic media industries.

[via sda asia]