At last, Microsoft have finally fixed an extraordinarily annoying broken feature of IE introduced with Windows XP Service Pack 2. The problem, for which I previously published a temporary solution and which has been experienced and documented by many since at least September last year, has been resolved. The W3C’s Bug 838 tracked and discussed this issue up until its resolution that has come with Microsoft’s Security Bulletin MS05-014. The patch is available through Windows Update.

The W3C QA team have published a document explaining the issue and solutions, which has been linked from the MarkUp Validator. Hopefully, this now means the continuing flow of error reports to www-validator will cease, or at least slow down. Of course my recommended solution has been, and always will be, to use an alternate browser that does not suffer from such fatal bugs. This is especially the case for user’s of the validator since most will be web developers that really need to develop within standards compliant environments; however, the persistent use of IE among many developers is one thing I fail to understand.