i·me·michael

Give me a ping, Vasily. One ping only please. Never underestimate your blip on life’s radar.

Yes, I was pointing out that Mark is very aware.of.his.Daypop.ranking, but it was meant as a bit of sarcasm, and I don’t want to infer that Mark writes with an eye on popularity. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Mark is at a point where he could burp and hit Daypop’s top 40 [ed.—Go ahead, we dare you.], so seeing what I read as a rant with the tone of, “This sucks, that sucks, they suck! Fuck this, I’m outta here!” start the dittoheads nodding was a bit frustrating.

I grant you, Mark neither asked for, nor needs to acknowledge any responsibility in his writing, based on his popularity, but he has set himself up as pundit. To me, that sets up a certain dynamic, but it isn’t my place to beat around the bush talking smack when I could have simply, and more concisely said, “Dude, where’s the responsibility? Where’s the humility?”.

Boys, put down the pointy sticks and play nice.

“Sounds like a movie we saw once,…” made me hyper aware [ed.—Get it; hyper aware?] that I was doing the exact thing that I was at odds with, and that it was the wrong approach. I was doing a bit of ranting, and a bit of baiting, both of which were wrong. I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize for the spanking. Actually, me spanking Mark leaves me with a visual that I’d rather avoid. It was closer to burned in effigy anyway, since spanking implies that I am somehow in the dominant position here, and that is hardly the case. I also got rid of those leather chaps years ago.

It’s often not what you say, but how you say it.

I see the direction XHTML 2.0 is taking as being in keeping with the W3C’s stated goal of transitioning HTML to XHTML; XHTML being an application of XML. Is it hostile to ordinary people who design websites? Well yeah, certain aspects of it are very hostile. HTML is an application of SGML, and is very easy to learn and use. XHTML is an application of XML, which is a subset of SGML, and as it rolls along towards its future, it may well break with everything that made the web an everyman’s playground.

I’ve made mention previously that I thought people may have been moving to XHTML without knowing what that meant. Validating to XHTML became the cool thing to do in the independent community, when they probably should have stayed with HTML 4.01. In that, I think Mark is correct, but for the wrong reason. Not that the standards are bullshit, or the W3C irrelevant, but that XHTML is the wrong application for the typical personal site. There isn’t all that much X in XHTML at the moment, unless you can write your own DTD and/or understand Modularization. Even then, currently it’s easier to (validly) write a document in an application of XML, and include XHTML, than it is to include an application of XML in an XHTML document. The future compatibility issue really only becomes a problem when environments, or user agents can no longer feasibly support the tag soup of HTML. And who is the chicken, and who is the egg in that scenario? If these new XML capable environments are smart, they’ll be dumb as browsers when it comes to legacy markup, much like Mark’s parse-at-all-costs RSS parser.

XHTML 2.0 is not a fork in the road. The scenic coastal road that was HTML has been found to be a dead end, and XHTML 1.0 is a rest stop on the way to the eXtensible future of the web. At least that’s the way the W3C seems to see it.

Lastly, yes, it took me at least a day to figure out how to properly formulate this post so as to remove my foot from my mouth without calling for the jaws of life. And whenever you need to put any of this in perspective, Mark pointed out a Doonesbury comic that sums it up pretty well.