As announced on the IEBlog today, web standards guru Molly Holzschlag will be working as a contractor to try and get at IE (Internet Explorer)’s standards and interoperability issues. This is pretty exciting news for web standards: Molly is a very highly qualified advocate of web standards, and with any luck she’ll be able to pound her message through the bureaucratic net at Microsoft.

I’m not one of those people who believes that Microsoft actually doesn’t care about web standards, or that Microsoft is willfully ignorant — or even that Microsoft intentionally perverts web standards in their products in order to increase market control. I think that Microsoft’s main problem has to do with scope: the fact that they’ve intertwined Internet Explorer so deeply into the operating system makes for a lot of extra problems in making the major changes required to get any significant change accomplished. Molly is a very dedicated and knowledgeable web standards guru, and I have high hopes that she can accomplish something substantial.

I’m looking forward to seeing what will happen!