The Microsoft giant has been quite agile this year with regards to internet technology and standard compliance.
First of the IE7 development is promising. The IE development team has been actively communicating with the web development community through their blog and actually fixed many of the bugs reported in the beta version.
So it seems that finally after all those years we are getting a more standard compliant browser replacing IE6. Of course it will take some time to update the masses and again it will depend on the upgrade rate for Windows Vista. My forecast for the browser future is that one year after the release of IE7 we might be looking at a fairly standardised browser platform for all. But again we will have to support the legacy IE 5, IE5.5 and IE6 for a while.
There is another light at the end of the tunnel. One of the quirks irritating us web techies is when you paste code from Word into your WYSIWYG editors for web publishing. There are plugins and parsers that do a fairly good job at cleaning up the code but the amount of dirt that accompanies a Word document formatted with creative colours and fonts can break even the most effective automatic clean up attempts. It has even reached the point that a certain government agency put a requirement in their tender document stating that their next content management solution must clean up the word HTML crap.
A recent blog post from the Word development department highlights a new feature for posting content online using Word 2007 and yes they have really spent a lot of time on making this code HTML compliant. There is also an API for creating new plugins for web applications so it should be a fairly simple procedure to post content to your favourite content management system (wink wink) using Word 2007.