Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a ‘Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock.’
So says Mark Pilgrim in a post on Semantic obsolescence
On the one hand, he has a point, in that I know of no other site that adheres to standards, and, more importantly, to the spirit of standards, as closely as the various ‘Dive Into’ sites, and now the W3C have pulled the rug from under him.
On the other hand (as Matt Jones points out) XHTML 2.0 looks awfully scary as more and more seemingly essential tags from previous incarnations of (X)HTML get dropped, but the end result will be an improvement, making it easier to make websites, and making those websites better vehicles for disseminating information.
As far as I’m concerned, this is a good thing: I’m glad I happened upon the sites of standards evangelists when I first started trying to make a website. It made my life easier: I couldn’t make a page that sniffed for a thousand and one obsolete browsers and served up a different chunk of HTML packed with intricately nested tables if I tried and, on the rare occasions I get things right, most people are able to read the content on the pages I make. This is a good thing, and one influential web guru getting his knickers in a twist, ironically because he is such a standards fan that not using the very latest spec is unthinkable, doesn’t change that.
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