It’s become quite fashionable to badmouth Microsoft, their proprietary extensions to Web languages, and their lack of standards support, but really they were just responding to Netscape. Way back when, Netscape was ruling the roost and doing unspeakable things to the infant HTML.

Netscape introduced several non-standard tags that only it supported, the most obnoxious of which was the tag (which ironically is still supported by Firefox), but they also were responsible for and and introduced the now-standard _{and ^{. They took a lot of flack for it, but they used Microsoft’s now-standard response that they will support the standards as they see fit but continue to try to develop the Web into more than it was on their own.}}