Every web developer codes for IE first and Firefox second. I respectfully submit that the Code everyone uses IS the standard. The fact that IE has 60-70% market share. 

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_explorer.asp

Crawl out of your caves and man up. IE may suck but your stuck with it. And no amount of complaining about standards or DryHumping firefox will change that.

Becoming standards compliant will only serve to crush the competition anyways, if what you say is true, the only reason to use Firefox was the standards compliance.

Who still uses IE? Use Mozilla or Opera and avoid the IE hassle all together.

AT adds: At the last count, I think the figure was about 95% of the world's population.

Hey thanks for clarifying to me the errors of my post, I was in a hurry this morning and didn't take the time to check whether or not my information was still valid. I still don't believe that IE8 will be all that great. I do believe that the Acid Test 3 is almost finalized and at the moment, none of the major browsers can successfully pass that test.

Another custom tag that must be included on all web pages is:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Random-OS-Crash-using-non-IE-browser"
content="false" /> 

Otherwise your site will cause the browser's PC to crash if they are not using one of the many semi-compatible versions of IE.

If you actually read The Inq's article you'll see that Microsoft has decided to make IE8 standards mode the default and you'd only need to add a tag to your page if you want it to use the IE7 mode.

The alistapart article you linked to is now out of date!

More info here: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/

When will MS learn? I think they realized how much they botched IE6. They should only need two rendering modes. One for older IE6-style pages and one newer one to be as web standards compliant as possible. They are overmanaging an overexaggerated problem. They're just going to make things worse off for the future if IE9 comes with its own special rendering mode.

And if *you* read the article you'll see that IE8 no longer needs any special tag to be in standards mode. That's the whole point of this news article.

Derr..

Looks like Microsoft shat their pants over the EU Commission. Reminds me of that famous photo of Paul Gascoigne and Vinny Jones.

Actually, if you read the article you will see that for IE8 to operate in "standards mode" a special HTML tag is required to be placed on all sites. This does not sound like "standard" behaviour to me and in fact it isn't. Once again IE8 fails to do things the proper way by requiring web site authors to use a special meta tag: 
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />
This is a cludge at best and should be the default for IE8. Who cares about broken pages? This will make the Lazy Web Developers stand out not only to the world, but to their employers as well. These standards exist for a reason, and anyone who says they are optional is a fool. 

Read more from http://www.alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype/