"For our Web developers, the No. 1 issue we see in our research is cross-browser compatibility," said Eric Ott, group product manager for Dreamweaver at Macromedia. "The browsers start off with standards but then build on top of that with their own bells and whistles. So developers pull their hair out trying to make things work in both browsers.

Macromedia, for example, said that 84 percent of its Dreamweaver users test their sites for Netscape's 4.x browsers, followed by 73 percent testing for IE 5.5. Sixty-six percent test for IE 5.0, 47 percent for IE 4.x, and 43 percent for Netscape 6.

But now the authoring tools do the time-consuming work, automatically spitting out code that renders properly on whatever browser a visitor might have. With authoring tools automating that ungrateful work, what's the point of Web standards?

Note that the Java SOAPElement is actually a subclass of Element )

SVG is a vector graphics format for the Web, developed by the W3C and has largely failed to be implemented.

The W3C's Xquery 1.0 moved to Proposed Recommendation status in November, bringing the prospect of a SQL-like approach to XML data querying one step closer.