Ya got that right!

All the other browser runner-ups may think that limiting themselves to being "standards compliant" somehow makes them better?

Well, it seems to me that IE is able to render whatever code that we throw at it, without choking and making the screen look like garbage.

If another browser can't do that, then it's the browser, and nothing more.

Imagine if someone only understood "standard english" and you asked them, "Hey, ya'll know iff'n something is close ta here fer a bite ta eat?"

They would just stare at you with a blank look, because you haven't spoken "Standard english".....well, seems like their problem, not the speakers.

Get with it, ya bunch ov VW driving, hippies!
While "free love" might be fun, none of your crap-ass template lookin blog sites are paying MY bills!

If you don't think we need standards, then why is there even a W3C? Why don't we just let M$ tell us what we should be doing with our web pages? Why don't we all just get in line behind the almighty M$ and just do what they tell us to do? If all browsers speak the same standards compliant language, and by the way IE6 fails to render some perfectly compliant pages, then as a designer you don't need to think about what browser is rendering your page. You simply write one set of code and all browsers will render that code the same way. I see your point, that statement makes no sense. Why should coders get off so easy? Why should we learn a standard way of doing something, that doesn't make any sense. M$ has been trying to keep people using their browser since they introduced it. Do you remember ActiveX objects? How about the early days of Front Page Extensions (sure, they are available to other browsers now but not at first)? And even the simple innerHTML was at first an IE only thing. I will admit that some of the things that IE introduced, that were not standard when introduced, have made it into the standard. But it's not because it was the best way to do it, it's because M$ forced the rest of the world to do it that way.
Just because M$ is the biggest, doesn't make them right all the time. If IE could render all standards compliant pages correctly (and they can't), I don't think there would be much of a squawk about anything, but they have not kept up with the rest of the world (that is evidence of the "we are better then you" mentality that M$ has) with respect to standards. They are just now making an attempt to play catch up by releasing IE7, but that was not even on the books until they realized that people were dropping IE in favor of the faster, standards compliant browsers.

Yes, this is just my opinion, but it is shared by millions of web developers around the world that don't all speak "standard English", but we do all speak "web standards".

By the way, the world does not revolve around M$, even though they think it does.

Standards compliance may not necessarily be "better", but it sure is more attractive! I'd like to actually be able to get some work DONE and not spin my wheels trying to patch things up for a brower that plays its own way. The whole idea of HTML in the first place was to be able to render documents consistently across different hardware platforms. Nowadays, we not only have different machines looking at our web sites, but a number of browser options for each. Imagine if we had to continually develop sites that would work for all browsers if NOBODY followed any standards! The web would be so fragmented among sites that worked properly in only one browser that it would be hard to make use of it. Oh, but wait - it already is like that to some degree. What a mess. Why do you think standards are being set and adopted?
BECAUSE IT'S A GOOD IDEA!