OIs there any good reason why they all don't standardize
Well, they didn't even standardize the basics (HTML, CSS, etc). There is a
test called
acid2 browser test developed by the web standards project, which test browsers' compliance with the standards of HTML4, CSS1, PNG and Data URLs. I didn't see a browser that passes this test completely yet (even though
Microsoft changed the core rendering engine of IE8 to pass the acid2 test).
Standardizing javascript (and how different browsers handle it) is going to be more tough, and I believe that this will never happen in the near future. For God's sake, Microsoft has it's own dialect of javascript (jscript). I do not believe that browsers are going to handle javascript in the same way any where in the near future.
Why don't the key players sit together and try to get a solution to ease the lives of the web developers? Well, I think this has to do with politics, and has to do with the ways they do marketing. If you go to your favorite website, and find out that you can't view it unless you use IE, you might ditch firefox, and vice versa.
What shall we, the developers, do? Just keep on using the libraries that will hide the incompatibilities.
[ February 14, 2008: Message edited by: Alaa Nassef ]