'A' is for annoying and NOT accessibility...

I'm a web developer, I write websites and web applications.

As a web developer, certain things that I produce are subject to various accessibility laws. I make a note of pointing out that not all of what I produce is subject to those laws since not everything I write is publicly accessible, and the brief of a particular project might be exclusive of such things.

Anyway, this legislation is often quite vague: 'we're not sure what we want, but if you don't do what we want, we'll take you to the cleaners...' or something to that effect.

So, as a developer -- and as a developer who tries to keep at the pointy end of technology -- I try to act in such a way as to anticipate the whimsy and capricious thinking of the legislators and cover as many options as is practical.

With this in mind, I invested in a number of books discussing proper, valid use of Cascading Style Sheets [CSS] and valid Hypertext Markup Language [HTML]

All was good. I've since developed some nice, standards-compliant and wholly accessible web applications .. but wait!

There's a fly in this otherwise, soothing ointment. A fly by the name of Microsoft. Yes, the Beast of Redmond has decided that their browser; Internet Explorer, isn't going to support the standards properly and break just about every damn thing you put in front of it, much like a petulant 3-year old with his most expensive toys from unwanted relatives, arms folded and pet lip inclusive.

This is particularly annoying -- thus, the title of this discourse -- because how the hell am I meant to produce standards-compliant and wholly accessible web applications when the company responsible for the market-leading browser has no intentions of producing an up-to-date version of their software?