Monday, October 30, 2006

World (Wide Web) War

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web many years back and then formed the W3C to govern it, has just announced that he's forking the language.

I am hardly in a position to tell Sir Tim his business, but this strikes me as a fantastically bad idea. And I mean "let's smear ourselves with honey and go bear tipping" bad.

As near as I can tell, the move is motivated by two primary factors: the fact that, six years after XHTML 1.0 became a recommendation, the majority of people are still not even meeting HTML 4.01 code standards (a venerable seven years old); and that several very prominent names have recently thrown up their hands in disgust and told the consortium to stick it.

In regards to the second point, it may have been a good move. A lot of those who were discontented were specifically angry at the fact that the W3C hasn't been seen to do much of anything in quite some time. For the first part, though, it will be a disaster.

Down in the trenches

I spend a good amount of time on one of the many Web development forums that can be found in cyberspace, and I can tell you that there are certain questions that tend to crop up time and time again. One of them is, "Should I be using HTML 4, XHTML 1.0, or XHTML 1.1?" It's then followed up with, "Strict or transitional?", "What's frameset do?", "Why does this DOCTYPE thing keep hosing my layout?", and "Why is this worth my time?"

The only reason it doesn't get asked more often is because a lot of the people out there don't even realize that there's a choice to be made.

See, the problem isn't that (X)HTML is outdated and needs to react to changing technologies — at least, that's not the problem yet. The problem is that the average rank-and-file Web developer doesn't see what's broken with the current versions. Because, to be quite honest, it works. People aren't failing to adopt XHTML because it doesn't meet their needs; they're failing to adopt it because HTML does.

Maybe you can lay blame with the browser makers. If the browsers enforced the standards, people would have to fix their code so that their pages worked. Everyone upgrades to XHTML, validates their pages, and the world is happy again.

Except that, as a browser maker, you'd be insane to go that route. The first browser out the gate that enforces standards strictly is going to get killed, because everyone using it will see a browser screwing up pages, not the other way around. It's intuitively nonsensical that the working version is incorrect, even if it happens to be true. Any such browser would disappear inside six months.

Perhaps you can blame the educators for failing to make budding Web developers aware of the issue and its implications. This assumes, though, that all Web developers were taught by someone. In many, if not most, cases they're self-taught by trial and error.

XHTML — and the XML into which it is intended to evolve — offers a variety of benefits, in theory. But theory matters very little to the people actually making the pages.

Triage

So what should Sir Tim have done? I don't have a damned clue.

I think that the only way you're going to get people to adopt anything is either by punishing them for non-compliance or rewarding them for compliance.

The very nature of the Web and browser economics makes punishment out of the question.

Maybe you could convince the search engines to consider code validity in page relevence, effectively demoting anyone with invalid code. That's not really within the operating parameters of a search engine, though.

As for rewards… what? You can throw that little validation badge on your pages, but that doesn't get you anything — and, to be perfectly honest, you can add it whether or not your page is valid.

So I have no answers, which is hardly a surprise. I think that the real issue, though, is in finding a way for proper XHTML to be beneficial enough to the bulk of Web developers that they'll make the switch. Introducing more options that they won't understand, if they're even aware of them, won't solve a thing.

Further reading for the terminally bored:


posted by Smitty @ 6:09 PM 1 comments

Monday, October 23, 2006

Crusade

I have at my disposal a very diverse set of religious beliefs and convictions. I would like to ask you all your opinions on a recent Wired article.

My own reactions to it vary, and will be discussed at a later point.

posted by Smitty @ 6:41 PM 1 comments

Sunday, October 01, 2006

When good language goes bad

Apparently, Arizona quarterback Kurt Warner was dismembered on the field today. I know this because the commentator during the Seahawks/Bears game said, "He fell apart on the field today — literally."

Literally is one of those idiomatic expressions that has begun wandering far afield of its actual meaning. I can't entirely surmise why Al Michaels thought the word was necessary in that sentence, since Kurt Warner is very much in one piece, even if his pride and career are not. I can only assume that it was used to mean "really badly."

Another such phrase that comes to mind is fighting fire with fire. It tends to be used synonymously with give him a taste of his own medicine. It's very much not the same metaphor.

Picture it: There's a house engulfed in flames. You show up, intent on saving the building. So you whip out your trusty flamethrower...

The meaning of the phrase is that you're using tactics that will only aggravate the situation, much like hitting a burning house with fire is going to make it burn faster.

All of this leads me to one question, to which I do not know the answer: Is this definition creep part of the natural process of a living language, or is it symptomatic of something going on specifically in our country?

posted by Smitty @ 10:11 PM 2 comments

What, no Jurassic Park reference?

Paleontologists have recovered soft tissue from a t-rex. I don't really have anything to add to this, other than: awesome!

As the article mentions, this has the potential to solve some huge questions about dinosaurs. It's not likely to produce any tyrannosaurus clones, though, which is a shame (how would environmentalists feel about reintroducing a species that went extinct 65 million years ago?).

On a side note, I applaud the article for avoiding the obvious Jurassic Park reference, although the choice of a Sears commercial reference is curious.

posted by Smitty @ 9:59 PM 0 comments