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The Daily Whim

If You Don’t Like It, Don’t Look At It

Mon. Jan 13, 2003

Angry Web Authors

Angry Web Authors – “I bought into every argument the W3C made that keeping up with standards, validating, and using semantic markup now would somehow ’future-proof’ my site and provide some mystical ’forward compatibility’ [...] Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant.”

Mark Pilgrim, who has been a semantic markup evangelist nonpareil, is now more than a bit upset over the W3C’s proposed XHTML 2.0 spec, which supposedly drops the tags , , , , , and

through

. “Not deprecate it slowly over time, mind you, but just f*cking drop it.”

While I can appreciate his fr*stration, I’m not sure Mark realizes the impact he’s had over the past six months or so. For example, there’s a tag wrapped around his words above, and not just in his honor. I started using it to mark up quoted text a few days ago. I try to think more semantically when I’m adding to this site, largely as a resultof reading Mark’s words. I’m certain I’m not alone in being influenced in that way. These are good things, no matter what the W3C eventually does.

And one closing note about XHTML 2.0 … do you remember the HTML 3.0 spec? I didn’t think so (“What happened to HTML 3.0? ... the difference between HTML 2.0 and HTML 3.0 was so large that standardization and deployment of the whole proposal proved unwieldy.”).

Posted 10:15AM, Mon, Jan 13 2003 in · · 2 Comments below


Peanut Gallery

1  Beth wrote:

Dropping the h1 through h6 tags? What? And they're going to be replaced by...?

Comment by Beth · 01/13/03 05:54 PM
2  PhotoDude wrote:

According to an interesting discussion thread at the W3C, they will be replaced by "h+section." The thread is quite revealing. Comments like "All we need now is to remove the <a> tag, and we're done," and "I think the WG should examine common websites to find out what web developers (not web designers) want/need," seem to indicate a large scale pissing match filled with condescension. But some of the comments foreshadow my mention of HTML 3.0, a spec that made such wholesale changes it was too unwieldy to implement in one fell swoop. Thus, we got HTML 3.2 followed by HTML 4.0, making similar changes in two steps. Perhaps the same will come out of this. But Mark was serious. He's converted his site to HTML 4.01. Me, I'm thinking PDF's....

Comment by PhotoDude · 01/14/03 05:56 AM
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