Standards and politics aren't mutually exclusive.
I don't disagree with having standards at all, obviously. I just don't share the viewpoint that they should not be broken at all costs. Standards are often refined to encompass extensions if the extensions prove popular.
Of course there's got to be standards, but who sets them, is where the politics comes in.
(And before you say 'an independent body', think very carefully about what that means...)
microsoft seem to be standing accused of promoting development tools that make use of non standard extensions to the standards. People take those up, which increases reliance on its browser. That's a classic case of a commercial reason for doing something overriding a technical one. Some people say that's sacriligious because it goes against standards, while i say that if it makes my life easier (or doesn't make it harder) I don't really give a damn about the fact that a particular feature i may be benefitting from has broken standards.
That's all i'm saying.
You may not care as an end user, but those of us who work with this stuff need to. Internet Explorer is the perfect example. Until very recently, web design has been a case of designing for standards-compliant browsers, then finding out how broken it is in Internet Explorer and adding in special rules to cope with its brokenness. Mostly, it doesn't matter whether you were designing with Safari, Opera, Firefox or Chrome - the result will be close enough to identical across these browsers, but broken in IE.
IE8 has improved matters to some degree (although IE6 and 7 aren't completely dead yet, unfortunately, and still have to be catered for). IE9 should in theory be better still, but based on the current platform previews Microsoft are churning out, it can't even display transparent PNG images properly or render curved corners on boxes with a
border-radius set.
Another huge annoyance with IE is that while every other browser is available for Windows, Linux and OS X, IE is only available for Windows meaning that as a web designer you need a copy of Windows available to do testing. IE7 and 8 only work with XP and above and IE9 only works with Vista and above. IE6 only works with XP and below. This means you need *multiple* copies of Windows.
If IE
just worked like everything else, you could have some confidence that your design would be at least mostly usable without testing it. As it is, there's nearly always some nasty surprise waiting for you.
Edit: Yeah, and what Panoramix said.
Further Edit: Oh, and don't get me started on the evil that is Silverlight.
