Molly was not a happy girl. And she got a chance to tell Bill Gates directly when we were at the Mix n Mash a few weeks ago. Why was Molly sad (or was that mad)? Because she has worked with Microsoft to help them embrace web standards, they have done a lot on this path, but it was all still NDA and she wanted the world to know and it was really bugging her.

So she told Bill and he said he's definitely do something about it because there was nothing to hide.

And yesterday, Dean Hachamovitch wrote a long post about passing an important test called Acid2 that tests interoperability standards.

He talked about the work they have been doing and pointed to an interview on Channel9. And he said the IE Team will be showing off a lot of their work (developer perspective) at MIX08.

Why the long wait?

Dean says: "For IE8, we want to communicate facts, not aspirations. We're posting this information now because we have real working code checked in and we're confident about delivering it in the final product."

This is definitely a slippery slope that different teams deal with differently. The Astoria Team has been designing much of Astoria (ADO.NET Data Services) in the open. I hear members of different teams at MS talk about things they are hoping to accomplish but are afraid to blog about them because they don't want to be held accountable. There are also all kinds of legal issues as well if someone mentions something which ends up not getting implemented, then some company sues Microsoft because they bet the farm on that feature. Oh, I don't envy all the problems that huge corporations have to worry about.

So if Molly's happy, then I'm happy, cause I know she's looking out for me, as a developer and as and end user of the web. Thanks Molly. See you at MIX!