Now that the bickering, and virtual frothing at the mouth has died down, lets take another look and see what everyone was up in arms about.
XHTML 2.0 became the talk of the town after a seemingly rabid Mark Pilgrim took it, and the W3C to task for leading him down the primrose path to perdition and ruin. He was up in arms over the deprecation of certain elements, and the overall lack of backwards compatibility in XHTML 2.0 that would effectively render his finely-tuned, semantic markup obsolete.
Funny though… he knew all this in August when he wrote about the Changes in XHTML 2.0 and he didn’t seem all that upset about it. He also pointed out, in this earlier post, that someone had already mocked up a working XHTML 2.0 page. After seeing it he even brazenly said he was going to convert all his pages to XHTML 2.0.
So who could have predicted that the bickering that Mark envisioned would occur over this working draft would originate with Mark himself? Well, umm, Mark of course.
Mark “Find me another site that is as semantically rich”
Pilgrim has everyone’s ear, and what better way to keep it than to rant about the deprecation of the cite element, and point to it as an example of all the web’s ills. Hey, if a post doesn’t go over well the first time, just rehash it, add a couple of invective flourishes, and you’re sure to hit #1 on Daypop.
Now I’ll admit to currently not understanding word one of XForms, but XHTML 2.0, on the whole, is nothing to get your panties in a twist over. The fact that some dive into mark fanboys, on the basis of his rant, are out there rethinking their use of XHTML, and inviting others to do the same, is more than a little silly.
Mark, I suggest you watch what you rant about before we wind up back in 1996. And yes, I’m talking at you and not with you.
On a totally unrelated note, look who’s powered by creativity.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Charles Crabtree // Jan 22, 2003 at 7:17 pm
Not only is it a blatant and unsophisticated rip-off of Zeldman’s design, but he even rips off a post from Acts of Violition and one from Kottke. What a cheese ball.
2 Christopher // Jan 23, 2003 at 1:01 pm
I’m simply amazed at the level of mimicry displayed in Mr. Shor’s site. If you look at the source code, you’ll notice that names of all elements, scripts, and style sheets are pretty much the same as well. I don’t pretend to think my site is terribly original, but yikes! Oh, and don’t forget to check out the emotions section if you’re interested in seeing various pictures of Mr. Shor shirtless.
3 J // Jan 23, 2003 at 7:12 pm
Heh… "Powered By Zeldman" could be the next big thing! Almost every search page is "Powered by Google" these days. Zeldman should sell high quality templates and stylesheets emblazoned with "Powered by Zeldman". Or even better, how about "Empowered by Zeldman" - Ooooh, it puts a whole different spin on it!
I’m rambling now, aren’t I…
4 michael // Jan 24, 2003 at 1:55 pm
“The sincerest form of flattery…”
I could swear someone else did the emotions thing too. You emailed him/her and they took a photo of themselves portraying that emotion. I’ll have to see if I can dig that up somewhere.
I’m sure the big Z isn’t all that upset about his mini-me clone. He’s usually pretty good about these things. I just thought it was funny that the young Mr. Shor’s tag-line was powered by creativity.
5 Mark // Jan 24, 2003 at 6:35 pm
1. What part of "I’m converting all my pages to XHTML 2.0. Accessibility be damned. Backward compatibility be damned" do you not understand as sarcasm? cf. Changes in XHTML 2.0
2. My position on XHTML has been going steadily downhill, the more time I spend investigating it. cf. A warning to others
3. The August draft of XHTML still had the cite element. It was dropped from the December draft, and stayed missing in the second December draft (a week or two later). There were several comments on www-html and www-html-editor from concerned citizens wondering where it went, and no reply whatsoever from anyone in the HTML working group. As far as anyone knew, it had simply been dropped without discussion or explanation. It turned out to be a clerical error, but the fact that intelligent members of the public would even believe that the HTML working group was capable of such a pointless, user-hostile, backward-incompatible act (cite *has* been around for 10 years, it was in TBL’s original HTML drafts in 1993) should tell you how poisoned the atmosphere surrounding XHTML 2.0 has become.
4. Let’s not even talk about MIME types, cf. Eddies in the space-time continuum
Why can’t we all just face the fact that XHTML 2.0 is HTML 3.0 all over again?
6 gary // Jan 27, 2003 at 3:06 pm
http://www.emotioneric.com/
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