As the Internet Explorer team works to put the finishing touches on the mobile version of IE9 so that it can be incorporated into the Windows Phone 7 later this year, The Next Web's Alex Wilhelm has found a reason to celebrate: standards compliace. That's good news for developer, Wilhelm points out, but that means it's also good news for consumers, who can expect that most websites they would visit from their anchored desktop PC will look and function similarly on the go.

What we are going to do is lay out for you what is coming in the mobile version of IE9, something that Windows Phone 7 will receive this year. If you are a developer this is important news to you, but not for the reason you suspect.

No, WP7 market share is still small enough for you to ignore, but as it turns out, if you test your site on IE9 for PC, it should render the exact same on IE Mobile 9. Why is that? According to the IE team:

We've worked closely across the Windows Phone [team] over the last few months to deliver the same IE9 browsing engine--the same code, the same standards support, the same hardware acceleration, the same security and privacy protections--for Windows Phone as we've delivered on the desktop.

The same blog post from the IE group goes on to say that "As a result, when you compare different browsers side by side using official W3C standards tests [...] you can expect very similar results for IE9 on Windows Phone and the Windows desktop."

If you're a happy developer and you know it, clap your hands, as Microsoft will finally cease to be a thorn in your side. You have to remember that IE9 has had a singular strong goal since its inception: standards compliance. That mentality is completely bleeding over to its mobile version, as it shares nearly all of the same components.

Read the full story at The Next Web.