I'd been developing for the web for almost 6 years and making my living on the web for almost 4 years when IE6 came out (August 27, 2001) and I certainly wasn't a pioneer. It was very primitive compared to now, but standards-based development was important to a lot of us waaaaaaaay before IE6 came out.
Things had been improving at a decent if not exceptional pace back in the late 1990s. IE6 was important but only as the latest of a series of browsers (from several vendors) that added better and better standards-support, it was that Microsoft kept IE6 in stasis for years was the problem not that IE6 wasn't an improvement over IE 5.
Think about it, WaSP (the Web Standards Group) was founded in 1998, back when IE4 was around (and was one of the pioneering browsers support CSS1 with Opera 3 being the other big one I remember). Zeldman started A List Apart in 1998 which was the same year Acid1 was created to test for CSS1 support in browsers.
Eric Meyer covered support for CSS in browsers in a 1999 article:
Here's one from him in April 2000 on O'Reilly asking "For literally years now, authors have been faced with a difficult dilemma: should we write pages to conform to the W3C standards, or write them to account for browser bugs?"
By the time IE6 came out, some web standards supporters pretty much thought the battle was won in terms of convincing browser makers about the importance of the standards-based web. We were looking forward to vastly better browser support every couple of years. And then IE6 froze a huge part of the market for a long long time.
It took Microsoft 5 years to update IE6 to IE 7. 5 years previous to IE6, IE3 was so primitive that it had just added support for HTML tables and barebones CSS1 features.
Two additional bits of data in my quest to prove IE6 (released August 2001) wasn't what started it all and disprove the idea that there weren't any standards back then.
Things had been improving at a decent if not exceptional pace back in the late 1990s. IE6 was important but only as the latest of a series of browsers (from several vendors) that added better and better standards-support, it was that Microsoft kept IE6 in stasis for years was the problem not that IE6 wasn't an improvement over IE 5.
Think about it, WaSP (the Web Standards Group) was founded in 1998, back when IE4 was around (and was one of the pioneering browsers support CSS1 with Opera 3 being the other big one I remember). Zeldman started A List Apart in 1998 which was the same year Acid1 was created to test for CSS1 support in browsers.
Eric Meyer covered support for CSS in browsers in a 1999 article:
CSS: If Not Now, When? http://meyerweb.com/eric/articles/webrev/199906.html
Here's one from him in April 2000 on O'Reilly asking "For literally years now, authors have been faced with a difficult dilemma: should we write pages to conform to the W3C standards, or write them to account for browser bugs?"
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/04/14/doctype/i...
By the time IE6 came out, some web standards supporters pretty much thought the battle was won in terms of convincing browser makers about the importance of the standards-based web. We were looking forward to vastly better browser support every couple of years. And then IE6 froze a huge part of the market for a long long time.
It took Microsoft 5 years to update IE6 to IE 7. 5 years previous to IE6, IE3 was so primitive that it had just added support for HTML tables and barebones CSS1 features.