Historically, Microsoft has put forth their own standards well before anybody else, only to see the official "Standard" be written differently by a 3rd party.
DOM, CSS, Box Model, Events, SVG, and a bunch of other things they did before anybody else (in a straightforward and reverse-engineerable way) were ignored by later groups who put together slightly incompatible "standards", some of which had no reference implementation. NN6, for example, was out for a full year before it implemented the W3C Events model that the Netscape team had proposed (which of course didn't exactly match the reference implementation that IE5 had in place 2 years earlier).
It's only recently that the Standards folks have managed to spec out things that the IE group hadn't done yet.
DOM, CSS, Box Model, Events, SVG, and a bunch of other things they did before anybody else (in a straightforward and reverse-engineerable way) were ignored by later groups who put together slightly incompatible "standards", some of which had no reference implementation. NN6, for example, was out for a full year before it implemented the W3C Events model that the Netscape team had proposed (which of course didn't exactly match the reference implementation that IE5 had in place 2 years earlier).
It's only recently that the Standards folks have managed to spec out things that the IE group hadn't done yet.