We wrote petitions and sent them to the appropriate folks. We spoke to our peers at Web conferences. We wrote editorials on our site and articles on other sites and in magazines. We issued statements--some of which got picked up by news organizations like CNET. We participated in open beta tests like the Mozilla project and wormed our way into closed beta tests such as the development of new versions of Internet Explorer. We yelled. We whined. We pleaded. We made nuisances of ourselves. We used the power of the Internet itself to disseminate our message.

And what was the end result?

Our success--and it's huge--is that we helped persuade both Netscape and Microsoft to embrace the W3C recommendations they themselves had a hand in creating and to fully support standards like CSS, HTML and XHTML in their browsers--along with increasing support for the W3C DOM and XML.

Would the browser makers have done this anyway?

Eventually, they surely would have had to--and Opera Software, the smaller competitor to the two Big Browsers, was always committed to doing so. Engineers at all these companies were in favor of supporting standards. They needed ammunition. They needed to be able to tell their management that "the public wants this now, not two years from now." We gave them that ammunition. That's why I say we "helped persuade" the browser makers to do the right thing. I think eventually they would have done so anyway. But the longer they delayed, the worse the Web would have been fragmented.