{"id":171,"date":"2003-04-19T12:09:34","date_gmt":"2003-04-19T16:09:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/well_not_all_standards_are_crap"},"modified":"2003-04-19T12:09:34","modified_gmt":"2003-04-19T16:09:34","slug":"well_not_all_standards_are_crap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2003\/04\/well_not_all_standards_are_crap.html","title":{"rendered":"Well, not ALL standards are crap"},"content":{"rendered":"

I realize that in my last entry<\/a>, I never really answered the opening question, “Are Standards Crap?” If you couple my failure to answer the question with my disparaging remarks about forward compatibility, standards, and XHTML 2<\/acronym>… you might come to the conclusion that I think standards are crap.<\/p>\n

Well, I won’t offer a non-apology apology<\/a> — I take full responsibility for my lack of clarity. So here’s what I really think. Some<\/em> standards are crap, and some are fine, or even good. HTML 4.01<\/acronym> has its quirks, but on balance it’s a fine standard. CSS<\/acronym> 1 and 2 are excellent, and I’m eagerly looking forward to version 3. XHTML 1<\/acronym>, I’m less thrilled about. Still debating this one internally.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

And as for XHTML 2? Well, let’s have no ambiguity here. Check out this gem<\/a> from the public www-html lists: <\/p>\n

\n

\n From: “Ernest Cline”
\n To: www-html@w3.org, www-html-editor@w3.org
\n Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 20:31:25 -0400
\n Subject: [XHTML2] Poor little old <a>\n<\/p>\n

\n Let’s face it. There is very little purpose that <a> serves in the
\n current working draft. About the only thing it still has going for it
\n is that links specified by <a> are still supposed to look like links…\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The thread continues with a chorus of yeas.2<\/a><\/sup>. Not one dissenting voice. Heck, why<\/em> keep the poor little old <a> tag, anyway? Oh, I dunno. How about because the <a> tag has been the primary linking mechanism in HTML ever since the the very first version of the language<\/a>, you blithering…<\/em><\/p>\n

Arrrrgh. Sorry about that. It just irks me to no end that the XHTML 2 folks are not only purposefully breaking backward compatibility (which is bad enough)… but they seem to be taking a gleeful pleasure in the destruction of the old. What gives? Who let these people in, anyway? Who gave these people the keys to the vault<\/a>, and why aren’t the soldiers guarding the entrance?<\/p>\n

This would all be less troublesome if only the XHTML 2 people would listen to Zeldman’s comments from a few months ago and name their specification something else<\/a>. “Advanced Markup Language”, or “Semantic Markup Language”, or something like that.3<\/a><\/sup> Then we could proceed with good conscience.<\/p>\n

But instead, here’s what’s going to happen. In less than a year, the XHTML 2 people are going to push their vision of the Semantic Web<\/a> out on us. Thousands of web designers are going to jump on the bandwagon and unthinkingly start slapping XHTML 2 DOCTYPES on their websites. The browser makers will ignore the new standard. Or mis-implement them. Or divert valuable resources that should be used to improve the current<\/em> standards. And thus, in five or six years we’ll have a mismash of incompatible browsers and tag-soup pages pretending to be XHTML 2. By that time, the designers of XHTML 2 (by then XHTML 2.2) will be bored and champing at the bit to unleash XHTML 3<\/acronym> on the world. Wheeee.<\/p>\n

What a train wreck.<\/p>\n

<\/a>1. Right now I’m thinking XHTML 1 qualifies as “Mostly Harmless”.<\/small><\/p>\n

<\/a>2. The thread continues with a digression into whether one could keep the <a> tag around if it was used for nesting links like the (currently useless) <object> tag, along with an off-topic discussion of whether to dump the <acronym> tag.<\/small><\/p>\n

<\/a>3. Of course those are bad names too, because they imply that HTML isn’t advanced and isn’t semantic. But you get the idea.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heck, why<\/em> keep the poor little old <a> tag, anyway?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}