One of the problems with the XHTML 100 Laziness Test was that it was… well, lazy. Rather than simply validating three random secondary pages, a real Laziness Test would spider through all pages. I didn’t bother with this approach for two reasons. First, my version of the Laziness Test was reasonably effective at weeding people out (although not perfect). Second, writing a well-behaved spider is well beyond my rather limited programming skills.
Fortunately, all is not lost. We can build such a spider. We have the technology. Or rather, the Norwegians do. (And isn’t that scary? What else are those Norwegians hiding from us in those fjords? Does the Defense Department know about this?) Anywaay. Via Zeldman, via Ben Meadowcroft, via… no, wait, that’s all the vias. Err… via all those people, researcher Dagfinn Parnas reports that 99.29% of the 2.4 million web pages in his sample fail validation.
In truth, Parnas did a much better job measuring general standards compliance than the XHTML 100, which was just a quick-and-dirty survey. Moreover, you can’t compare Parnas’s data directly with the XHTML 100 results. First of all, I was looking at the Alpha Geeks And Their Friends, while Parnas is looking at a much larger and much less geeky population. Second, Parnas is looking at HTML, while I was looking at XHTML only. Finally, Parnas’s analysis is fundamentally different in that he aggregates his data into one pool. For example, consider a site in the XHTML 100 where the first page validates, the first two secondary pages validate, but the last secondary page fails. Parnas would count that as three successes and one failure. I would count that as total success for Test #1 and total failure for Test #2.
But hey — let’s ignore all those distinctions. If you can’t compare apples and oranges on the Internet, where can you compare them? Parnas reports a 99% failure rate. In contrast, I report an Markup Geek failure rate (as measured by Test #2) of a staggeringly low 90%. I think we can all be proud.
If you do bother to read Parnas’s nearly 6MB pdf paper, and I certainly recommend that you do, be sure to look at the breakdown of the various types of errors. The bulk of the errors (after “no DTD declared”) consist of “non-valid attribute specified” or “required attribute not specified”. Not surprising at all. From my own experience, very few people seem to know that the alt tag is required or that <img border="0"> is illegal in XHTML 1.0 Strict. The only real puzzler in Parnas’s data was the relatively low fraction of pages with invalid entities. In the XHTML 100, invalid entities were a major killer. I don’t have a good explanation for this discrepancy, but hey.
Parnas concludes:
As we have seen there is little correlation between the official HTML standard and the de-facto standard of the WWW.
The validation done here raises the question if the HTML standard is of any use on the WWW. It seems very odd to have a standard that only 0.7% of the HTML documents adhere to…
A good question. For me, the reason to validate is not ideological. Simply put, validation saves me time. For any page design, there are a huge number of possible glitches across the various browsers. Validation doesn’t reduce the set to zero, but it does make the set a lot smaller. Hey, I don’t know about you, but I need all the help I can get.
Vincent Gallo: “If a fat pig like Roger Ebert doesn’t like my movie, then I’m sorry for him.”
Roger Ebert: “It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of ‘The Brown Bunny.'”
That Roger Ebert, he’s growing positively Churchillian in his old age.
So last Tuesday Lawrence Lessig sent me an email asking me and most everyone else in his address book to sign the “Reclaim the Public Domain” petition.1 Now, ordinarily I’m dubious about online petitions. Take the recent media deregulation debacle: the FCC received on the order of twenty comments for and 200,000 comments against, and Michael Powell went ahead and did it anyway. Hey, who knows — maybe each pro-deregulation comment was on average 10,000 times more persuasive than its anti-deregulation counterpart. If the bulk of the anti-deregulation comments came from where I think they came from, that ratio wouldn’t be surprising.
Nevertheless, the “Reclaim the Public Domain” campaign is a good idea, and it does come from one of my personal heroes, and it was, as Lessig pointed out, his birthday. So how could I say no? More to the point, how could anyone say no? Unless you think the proposed statute doesn’t go far enough. Otherwise, if you want perpetual copyright protection over your work, is paying one dollar after the first fifty years too much to ask? (It appears that hordes of well-heeled2 lobbyists are already answering, “Yes.”)
This is the kind of thing that just makes me want to rush off to law school, damnit. The problem is that maybe I could get involved in some activism as a student, but by the time I graduate it will be the year 2008. At the rate things are going, by then the battle will be over and I’ll just be another debt-ridden young IP lawyer trying to get a job. I imagine it’s rather hard to convince a company that you’ll fight tooth-and-nail to protect their intellectual property when deep down you don’t think fighting tooth-and-nail is always the ethical thing to do. Now is intellectual property a good thing? Absolutely. My mother is an author; my dad’s company makes innovative cancer treatment machines. Their livelihood depends on protection for their intellectual property. But do I believe in intellectual property über alles? Hell, no.
I suppose all lawyers struggle with this issue: how to best serve your client while adhering to your own personal ethics.3 Obviously there’s no magic formula, but it seems that most lawyers can find a niche if they look hard enough. Some lawyers want to be public defenders. Others want to be prosecutors for the state of Texas. There’s something for everybody.
I’m just wondering if the choices are a little more limited for IP lawyers. How many openings does the EFF have, anyway?
1. I should point out that “Lawrence Lessig sent me an email…” might give you the false impression that we, like, hang out and drink beer and stuff. No, no. The reason I meandered my way into his address book is because I recently asked him a couple of questions over email about law school, to which he graciously responded.
My home town is having a special election on Tuesday. Tonight at precisely 6:11pm, my phone rang:
Me: Hello?
Telemarketer Lady: Hi, I’m with the Republican party, and I’m calling about Measure E.
Me: (politely) Oh, I’m sorry, I’m not a Republican —
Telemarketer Lady: (click)
In retrospect, maybe I should have said, “Oh, how interesting,” and pretended to be a Republican for as long as I could, thus tying up valuable Republican party resources just before a critical school bond referendum. Unfortunately my Mama and Papa didn’t school me in the brutal Darwinian tactics of street-level political combat. Instead, they schooled me in answering the phone politely.
Perhaps this is the essence of our problem.
And on another front, M’ris is waging psychological warfare. I make an innocent reference to “Fiddler”, which has the unfortunate side effect of embedding a few of Fiddler’s songs and catchphrases in her head. So M’ris retaliates by trying to make me associate Trinity with Christopher Walken. Yuck! Again, see? Underhanded, vicious street-level combat, for which I am totally unprepared. So the question is, does this deserve a response? On the one hand… an eye-for-an-eye leaves the whole world blind. On the other hand… it’s just this kind of namby-pamby thinking that lets Republican Telemarketer Ladies just, like, walk all over people. But on the other hand… no. No! There is no other hand!
When you finally finish the first draft of a technical manual, you can’t help experiencing a sublime feeling of accomplishment.
And there’s nothing that deflates this feeling faster than wasting an hour babysitting the copy machine, waiting for the inevitable paper jam or system crash or whatever. Ugh. It’s all so mundane and tedious. Sometimes I try to pass the time by imagining that the process is… well, more epic or something…
Three Drafts for the QA team, on whom one can rely,
Seven for the Engineers, who do naught but bitch and moan,
Nine for the Managers with deadlines nigh,
One for the VP on his dark throne
In the land of Marketing, where the shadows lie.
One Manual to rule them all, One Manual to find them,
One Manual to explain it all, and at the Kinko’s bind them.
Nope, that didn’t really help.
Do not adjust your monitor. We’re back to our regularly scheduled style sheet. Buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, ’cause the Matrix-themed style sheet is going bye-bye… Sorry! Sorry. I can’t help myself.
Anywaay…
I just want to say for the record that working on two books at once is not easy. You go in to the office, crank away on manual #1 for eight hours. Then you return home, wolf down some food, and put about three more hours into manual #2.
Then you sit down and write a smashing journal entry. Or not, as the case may be.
I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Writing for eleven hours a day is draining, but it sure beats digging ditches for eleven hours a day. Don’t get me wrong, I like exercise and fresh air and all that. It’s just that I still don’t know how to swing a pickaxe or shovel dirt without doing bad things to my back, despite my father’s hours of patient instruction on proper pickaxe-swinging techniques.
This is why I’m glad I live in the world of today, rather than the world of my ancestors. I just don’t think I’d do very well in a world where my survival depends on coaxing potatoes out of the frozen Eastern European soil. Oh, sure — maybe I’d have been lucky and been born a rabbi’s son, in which case I would have spent my youth happily ensconced in shul with nary a potato to be seen. Also, let’s not forget that if you were the rabbi’s son, the chicks really dug you. (“Chava! Have I got a match for you!”) Nice work, if you can get it.
But more likely than not, I’d be forced to show off my potato-hoeing skills on a regular basis. This makes me very glad that I live in a society that values other skills also. Somehow I think drawing yourself up and proclaiming, “These are not the hands of a field worker! These are the hands of an artiste!” just wouldn’t cut it on the shtetl. It didn’t cut it in my Dad’s backyard, that’s for sure.
Anyway, we’ll see about being a little more regular about these here journal entries. Coming up next: the real, live, gritty, ripped-from-the-headlines, no-holds-barred story on how I’ve so far narrowly avoided becoming a lawyer. This year, anyway. Lawyering… now there’s another profession that wouldn’t have been so helpful on the shtetl. I mean, I’m sure the marauding troops of the Tsar would have wanted to read all those strongly worded briefs and injunctions and whatnot. But hey, when you’re galloping through the village with saber in hand… who really has the time?
Look out — it’s the end of the semester, and mild-mannered law professor Jeff Cooper is on a rampage!
Hulk SMASH puny exams! Hulk SMASH students who didn’t listen to Hulk in class all semester! Hulk SMASH!!
Ah, brings back those sweet, sweet memories of grading Introductory Astrophysics. And people wonder why the grad school dropout rate is so high.
So I finally caught The Matrix Reloaded yesterday. I liked it quite a bit — the action was superb, and the plot as a whole was a bit darker than I expected. Sure, the dialogue could have used some work, as others have pointed out. Unfortunately, most of the negative reviews that did so are essentially copy-and-paste jobs from the venerable SF Action Movie Review Template:
In short, little to be learned here.
By far the strangest review came from AintItCoolNews, where the reviewer is apparently upset that The Matrix Reloaded had no werewolves or vampires. I rushed to go read the AICN review because another article had mentioned this in passing, and my first instinct was, “Poor guy. I bet he’s been misquoted or taken out of context.” But no, the first article was absolutely correct. The AICN reviewer does indeed go on for several paragraphs about how angry he is that there were no werewolves. Or vampires. For the record: while The Matrix Reloaded had its share of deficiencies, a lack of werewolves and vampires was not among them. The reviewer was also very upset about a major plot event that as far as I can tell occurred only in the reviewer’s imagination. One would think a fanboy site would be more plot-detail-oriented, but one is, as usual, quite mistaken.1
The most on-point “negative” review I found was by Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post. Hunter doesn’t hate the movie, but at least he understands the plot and is thus able to separate the good from the bad in a coherent manner. A major step forward.2 Sure, I can quibble with some of Hunter’s complaints, such as his dislike for the “Burly Brawl”. (Personally, I thought the fight really picked up when Neo picked up that pole and started swatting the Agent Smiths around.) But I can’t disagree with Hunter when he says:
Alas, up front, too much time is spent on internecine Zion politics. Really, who cares, especially when expressed, ? la “Star Wars: The Attack of the Clones” and every movie ever made about Imperial Rome, in a rhetorical style that might be called High Fructose-Emulsified Purple. “The Council has asked me to speak tonight at the temple gathering,” intones old Anthony Zerbe in stentorian voice, in a toga, or is it a breechcloth or a nightshirt? Really, this never works, here or anywhere.
No, indeed it doesn’t. Heck, not even the Imperial Romans spoke in High Fructose-Emulsified Purple, as Julius Caesar’s own writings make clear. Which begs the question… why spend so much time and care crafting the stunts and fight scenes and costumes and then totally blow it on the politics?
The answer is obvious: it’s my fault. Or rather, my fault along with everyone else who declares their willingness to shell out nine bucks for the stunts and special effects alone. We’re victims of our own low expectations. At this point I should cry, “We should expect more!” But that sounds very movementarian to me, and I’m already getting a headache. I guess if we want a fusion of good wire-fu and good political dialogue, we’d better write and produce our own damn movies.
1. By now you might be scratching your head and wondering, “What on earth were you doing reading an AintItCoolNews review?” And you’d have a point. My only defense is that AICN is one of those habits wherein you have to endure numerous painful experiences before (hopefully) growing out of the whole thing. Like binge drinking, or Slashdot.
2. Ah, the Washington Post Style section… between Stephen Hunter and Carolyn Hax, they’ve almost made up for Hank Steuver.
Goer: “What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge control characters in comments?”
Distler: “No, Evan. I am trying to tell you that when you’re ready… you won’t have to.”
Whoa.
As you can see, we1 here at goer.org are eagerly anticipating the arrival of the new Matrix movie. I don’t particularly care about the alleged philosophical ruminations of The Matrix, all of which have been examined at length by earlier philosophers and writers. At best we can say that The Matrix has tied up these concepts and presented them in an appealing package. Which is something, at least.
Nope, I’m there for the action. I want to see Mr. Anderson wiping the floor with a hundred Mr. Smiths. I want to see Morpheus battling the Twins. Most of all, I want to see Trinity dealing out destruction while clad in black vinyl. Some might roll their eyes, thinking the black vinyl outfits to be hackneyed and cliched… faux cool. Hey, I’m just sayin’, I think Carrie-Anne Moss makes it work.
Finally, I apologize for the new, temporary, Matrix-themed style sheet.2 Unfortunately this site does not provide a style sheet switcher, so I’m afraid that if you don’t like the new look, you’re going to just have to suffer for the next couple of weeks. Please don’t be angry with me. Instead only try to realize the truth: there is no style sheet. Then you’ll see that it is not the style sheet that changes, it is only yourself.
2. If you don’t see any difference… then as Zeldman likes to say, “Kindly reload.”
The X-Philes grow ever larger. It’s become clear that I need to make some clarifications in how the tests work — that I have to state a couple of things explicitly, and that I might need to tighten up the rules to close some loopholes. In the meantime, we muddle through, as we must. Of particular interest in the latest batch: James Graham, a UK physics student who is embedding MathML in certain pages on his site. (Click to advance through the slides on the MathML page.) Also we must give due respect to St. Raphael Academy, which might very well be the most techologically advanced secondary school website ever. Certainly it beats the pants off of my alma mater’s site, which has lovely bordered frames, scrolling headline text courtesy of the <marquee> tag, and no DOCTYPE, presumably to spare us all from the horror. Of course it is a cash-starved California public school. I blame Gray Davis personally.1
I’ve also added a “Useful Reading” list to the Markup section. This list constitutes a small fraction of the external articles and documents that have been instrumental in shaping my thinking on XHTML and web standards. Of course I can’t begin to list all the articles I’ve read, nor can I provide access to all the personal emails and comments I’ve received of late. My thinking on this issue is still evolving. Still pulling things together. More to come.
1. Apparently so do others. Some people take their school’s website design awfully seriously.
Whoa, a cluster bomb? I hope not! Sounds dangerous.
Well, it has been rather busy around here. I’ve decided to collect all posts that are even vaguely markup-related and display them in a central repository. I’ve also included a list of sites that pass the XHTML 100 test suite. Again, we’re only testing validation and MIME-types. I’m purposefully ignoring Test #4, the “Why Are You Doing This” Test. You could be one of those rarified individuals that has actual technical reasons for using XHTML. Or you could be doing it for “softer” reasons: for political advocacy, as a personal learning experience, or simply to prove to yourself that you can do it. It’s all fine as far as I’m concerned.
Note that I tried to add the W3C Markup pages to the list, but failed. The main page validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict and provides the proper MIME-type to Mozilla. However, the second link I happened to grab is valid but serves up text/html. Ditto for the validator.1
The only downside is that on our sidebar we have to say goodbye to guest-blogger Byron Kubert. Byron’s adventures in Norwegian Viking School were gripping, but now he’s back in the States, and he hasn’t posted in months. He’ll still be accessible from the front page, though.2
Final note: I’d like to offer particular congratulations to stalwart young U.K. computer scientist Thomas Pike and his comrade and countryman, Thomas Hurst. Both of them serve up their pages as XHTML 1.1 to browsers that accept application/xhtml+xml and HTML 4.01 Strict to browsers that don’t — tags and everything. Now that, my friends, is real content negotiation. Gentlemen, I salute you.
1. On the plus side, you can validate the validation of the validator. What fun!
2. It’s a good thing Byron spent more time sailing ships and less time learning how to cleave skulls with an axe, or else I’d be a little worried about demoting him.