March 20, 2002

Web Snobbery

So I've been surfing around the web, looking at other journals and weblogs, trying to see what other people are doing for their design and content management. It's been educational, to say the least.

The good news is that I've discovered my journaling software Sugar Daddy: Moveable Type 2.0. First, I looked into Blogger, but Blogger is centrally managed, and its server has been hacked and attacked too many times for my comfort. There was Radio, but it costs $40, and said $40 would go directly to Dave Winer -- yuck. I took a look at blosxom, which was awfully cute ("only 60 lines of code!")... but no.

Finally, there was Greymatter, which was very, very close. Noah Grey deserves a lot of credit for putting this tool together by himself -- and spawning a host of imitators. Unfortunately, Noah is no longer supporting Greymatter. Also, Greymatter didn't integrate well with my old journal archive, and it wouldn't let me have a different essay for each monthly archive page (not without playing a little trick or two).

Anyway, it looks like Moveable Type's got it all and then some. Fast, even more flexible than Greymatter, and with a stellar web-based user interface. I will never bad-mouth Perl again. (Not that I've ever bad-mouthed Perl, but from now on if I hear anyone bad-mouth Perl, I'll at least know to smirk knowingly, the same way I do when I hear about 32-CPU Intel systems.)

My other discovery was that the Web designer community is rife with snobbery and breathless enthusiasm for bleeding-edge-technology-uber-alles. (And the Pope is Catholic, water is wet, ... yeah, yeah.) Still, you'd think there would be some maturation over the years.

A couple of years ago, websites were festooned with buttons that said, "This site best viewed in Netscape/IE 4." Now things are worse -- a depressingly high number of sites use JavaScript to judge whether your browser is worthy, and if you fall short, you get a message ordering you to upgrade to a browser that "supports web standards." A few people don't even bother with the obnoxious little message: they actually kick you out of their site if you don't make the cut. Apparently these people think they are part of some kind of movement.

Let's leave aside the fact that no browser fully supports web standards (HTML4.01 and CSS2) and focus on why someone might not have the latest, greatest browser:

• Their boss says so. Once a company standardizes its intranet on one browser, that's it. Everyone's stuck with the same software, and might be for years, end of story.

• They don't have the hardware. The latest browsers don't run so hot on old 386 computers. This is a particular problem for libraries, schools, and foreigners (but who gives a crap about them?)

• They have no idea what you're talking about. Your average user could not possibly care less what browser they use. They might not even know what "HTML" is. And no, these people are not beneath contempt -- they just don't care about the same weird, esoteric things that you do.

  Quick, web-boy -- under which simple physical principle does a standard flush toilet operate? No? You don't know? But you use one every day!

• They aren't going to download 20MB over dial-up just to see your webpage.

• They might be savvier than you think. Most of the really cool kids surf around with javascript, Flash, and images turned off. And they are not impressed with your bleating about how people don't upgrade fast enough.

But honestly, what the heck do I know? I still use a table-based layout. And my pages only validate HTML 4.01 Transitional. How sad is that?

Edit, April 2003: Now this site is all CSS-P based and validates HTML 4.01 Strict. Although I should point out that I used <i> tags to make this addendum. Take that, standards-weenies.