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http://www.w3c.org defines standards for web pages and HTML in general.
MicroSoft has not been very interested in following standards defined by others, but they seem to be picking it up, albeit a bit late, with such things as Office documents being saved in XML format and IE conforming more to w3c standards.
The main problem is that HTML can be written in many ways and in order to make it as easy as possible to write HTML that displays correctly, MS did a lot of work to make the IE a "forgiving" browser that allowed a lot of "shortcuts" to be taken - which can be good, but showed not to be.
In programming, rigid rules are quite often to be preferred over flexibility.
Now, let's get back to the XOOPS topic and off the browser topic. I am very pleased to see XOOPS being considered for this project and would help if I had the time, but for now all I can say is that the xoops.org forums is the place to ask for help - loads of helpful users here, willing to give you a push in the right direction.