[Fyron]

over half the sites out there are probably not w3c fully compatible, but look, the internet is not shuting down, failing, or anything. IT WORKS! get used to it!

Ok, let me give you this power adaptor for your PC. I am MS, so I ignore standards. Unfortunately, your house was built with standards in mind, so the adaptor shorts out and burns down your house. Now do we see why standards are important?

...if png was THAT popular for websites, I am sure everyone would start using it, and then microsoft would make it compatible...

PNG is a popular format, and is rising all the time. It will never be ubiquitous, and never should be. For images with low numbers of colors, GIF is better because it creates smaller files with no quality loss.

The problem is alpha transparency (blended level transparent pixels for smooth integration with the background instead of the on/off of traditional transparency). This is an awesome feature of PNG that web designers can not use because IE still can not render it after half a decade. Once again, the crappiness of IE stifles innovation. This is a huge problem... There are many excellent features of the w3c standard sets for CSS, HTML, XHTML, etc. that we can not use because IE is poorly implemented.

I see you did not quote el_phil saying:
Frankly if the site doesn't support IE it's the sites problem, not the browser. If you don't support the 85%+ market leader your stuborn or stupid.

Actually, I did. Please refer back a few posts.

do I really care about designing for w3c standards, NO! I will develop for what is popular, and as long as that is internet explorer, I have no reason to change.

This is frankly a rediculous argument that always comes up, I have no problem with IE, and why should I change something that works fine, and I have no problems with, just because you are saying IE does not comply with standards that I do not need to use as my site works with IE, and other useless points...

*cringe* There is little point in addressing the rest of this (especially since you missed the point entirely and I would just be repeating myself). Please do the world a favor and stop designing buggy web sites. Thank you.