But it isn’t just tags, AQ. JScript versus JavaScript? (There’s a difference.) ILAYER and LAYER? Plugins? And when you start using ALL of them, you start getting extreeeeeemely narrow.

And again: Old standards are fine. But lockergnome can’t even get those right.

http://chris.pirillo.com/archives/2004_03.html#009541

Peace everyone!

I apologize for forgetting my screen name on my previous two posts.

Think of it this way: back in the Good Old Days, HTML was pretty limited and there wasn’t a lot of oversight. So, Netscape said ‘Hey wouldn’t it be cool if we added tag x!‘ So people started coding with that one. And then Microsoft said, ‘Let’s add tag y!‘ And people started relying on that one, too. Netscape parries with something else. Microsoft adds something else again. And then sooner or later, you’re relying on all these proprietary things and writing what amounts to be two or three different versions of your site (at best) to get it to work for everyone. This is why it’s bad for you.

Matt, you should be ashamed if you honestly believe any of these are even close foils of the lockergnome change. This is dogmatic language, and practically religious in tone. It does not prove your point, and only can give most the impression that you can’t seem to analyze your position beyond zealotry, or take an honest look at yourself and what you’re saying. Irrelevant extremes will never make any point you make more real, or more correct.

The problem is that everyone has to write past your original comment because the analogy does not meet reality in any way. “So lets take your token bad markup—multiple nested tables for layout, badly nested tags, font tags all over the place—this is McDonald’s. If I’m on a road trip and need a quick bite, I’ll drive through because it’s convenient and ubiquitous. Though it’s obviously bad for you, it’s not going to kill you if you have a Big Mac. However if you try eating it every day, your body revolts and starts to deteriorate rapidly.” The fact that any of this is analogous in your mind simply blows my mind. The connection is what?

I mean this is just a weak argument until you can actually align a real world html occurence with any of your overblown analogies.

As for everyone I know who uses the web for general surfing, content is king, not code… or overblown standards protectionism. As long of the standards of html are followed, it does work, and doesn’t explode or rapidly deteriorate over time… the only thing that could possibly happen that would be bad is that browsers no longer support it.

Unfortunately for coders wanting to “move the web forward”, old html will be the majority standard for some time to come. Basic users are not going to go out of their way to keep up with the latest, flashiest new versions of their visual web design prog of choice, mainly because the program they use now works just fine. The code simply doesn’t matter to them, and it never will.

I like this article, Code is Food, about CSS / XHTML.

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Sure, but if what if I’m in the mood to visit Lockergnome using my whoop-de-doo GPRS-enabled XHTML-browsing phone? I pay for GPRS by the download, so I generally surf with images and CSS off. Now their site is completely fux0red. Before, I’d be willing to bet it was at least usable.

I don’t make a habit of surfing with my phone anyway, but gadget-carrying tech fans who own mobile devices probably ARE inside the scope of the Lockergnome audience.

That’s a valuable reduction. If indexing, accessibility, and easy re-factoring for alternate media and future user-agents aren’t important (a legitimate business decision), why the retrograde half-measure at LG? Use image maps or PDFs or some such. For whatever reason, LG seems to have elevated [comparatively] perfect browser rendering to the over-riding consideration. That being the case, there are easier ways to get there.

Yet LG is in a leadership position and knows it. I think what rightly bothers Matt is that LG’s adventure in time travel is therefore overt, a statement — Rip Van Winkle thumbing his nose at the Web, a louder-than-average scoff that it’s all just TV or will be, and the hand-wringers can get over it or not. Considering that LG’s wretched tag-soup of a homepage isn’t easier to implement than the polar options of 2004-markup or a menagerie of image maps, it’s hard to escape the notion that either something weird is going on or a statement’s being made. The only other explanation is that there’s no sane business process in operation at all, and Matt’s (and others’) reluctance to go there is a sign of continuing respect — shaken, but alive. Again, they could just use image maps. Or Flash.

All catechisms aside, LG’s move is either active (and tacitly vocal) or mistaken or mired in disregard. We don’t want to think any of these things about LG, want to continue pointing to it as a resource. Surely LG knows that its reach depends on savvy users referring and promoting it to others as a resource. Some explanation would then seem to make business sense, because it’s all damned inscrutable in silence. Guess it’s up to them.

Still, LG doesn’t lead with Web-dev: it’s more PC-centric, a desktop power user resource. Could be they’re not very interested in Web techologies at the user end of the stick, and we only imagined they were. Which, of course, is cool enough. LG has tons of goodwill in reserve.

Also, the world of folks dedicated to making Windows, IE, and Microsoft technologies in general perform optimally must part company somewhere with the folks who’ll allow utterly alternative solutions, in whole or part. I’m with the latter. The best, first step to inoculating against network perils is to use client software divorced from the OS; the best way to keep the Web free is to embrace sturdy, non-proprietary standards. Some prefer to reform from the inside. God bless ‘em. Guess there’ll be things we can’t talk about. Maybe this is one.

LQ

This better ranking of old-markup websites probably has a lot more to do with the dates on which these websites were created then with the fact they lack style(sheets). So this isn’t an argument against using XHTML/CSS.

I believe that everyone should practice what they preach or risk being irrelevant. Would you take financial advice from the CEO of Enron or Worldcom? Moral advice from a crooked politician? Cooking lessons from someone who regularly poisoned people? No, I don’t think you would. And you shouldn’t take web advice from someone who doesn’t attempt to respect the web?

I’m not a validation nazi, nobody is perfect. However in this specific case we have a blatant disregard. The cook is spitting in your food. Should you care? I think so.

I guess what moved me from lurker to poster was how you blew off Rogers’ argument, which I *did* find applicable. Your response indicates you still don’t think the parallel very strong — and Dougal agrees. But while Dougal gives a reason (too narrow by my view), you don’t.

Looking back at your post, the main points I see you raise are:

1) consuming bad markup, over the long haul, is bad for me and everyone/thing else on the Web
2) LG is setting a bad example, and they should set a good one, for ppl will look to their implementation for guidance
3) it’s against my principles to support people who don’t support my principles, in deed as well as in words.

(I may have missed other central points; if I have, it’s an honest oversight, not cuz I’m deliberately trying to skew the argument. Please point out any others that aren’t variants of the ones I found.)

So, in order:
1) The sky’s not falling; I’ve been abe to get a lot of (increasing) value from the Web since about 1993. By the time the Web would implode from the bad crap, we’ll be on to technologies that make XHTML/CSS look just as outdated as FONT elements are now. Of course, this means I’m not a big Sematic Web believer. Show me when it happens; in the meantime I’ll continue to get value from the inference engines (Google et al) that do a decent job in spite of the relative lack of structure.

2) perhaps, but is that reason to boycott them? To me, this is the point that maps well to Rogers’ PHP analogy. Arguable, using PHP is a bad way to code. A ‘real’ developer would use a ‘real’ language (for various definitions of ‘real’: OO, strongly typed, etc.), or a product built in one. If you don’t, then you’re developing wrong. And if you’re respected, people will follow yout lead, and MORe people will use the BAD THING, and where would that get us? With PHP, it gets us a LOT of people programming, more than might if they were limited to C++. Many of those people write bad code — buggy, doesn’t scale, hard to maintain, insecure, etc. OTOH, some create great things!

With HTML, same thing. Lots of people do it in various ‘wrong’ ways. But if it meets their goals, I think that’s good.

3) My original point: if LG is producing meaningful content, and you can consume it, then your argument with them is a religious one. Because they don’t eat their own dogfood, does that really make their articles less credible? Does the article about image rollovers in CSS not work because they don’t do rollovers like that themselves?

As you might surmise, I’m more of a pragmatist on technology issues than a zealot. All of these issues are part of business decisions. LG made some decisions based on their undetstanding of the technologies and their business goals. Those of you who think it’s a slamdunk that XHTML/CSS is automagically easier to produce or maintain than old-skool HTML and tables are dead wrong, and I (and most of you) have the experience to prove it. Look at the incredible hoops (CSS hacks, in particular) people jump thru to make their stuff work as expected.

This is NOT to say I’m against doing things the way you prescribe — just the opposite, I do every chance I get. But it’s always balanced by a variety of factors. Do you care about every single potential reader? Probably not, or you’d translate your site into a bunch of languages — it’s snobbery to think English is the One and Only. I may accommodate the blind by having a very well-formed RS feed, while at the same time producing table-based layouts so my visual presentation works as intended for the widest number of sighted people as practical. Not as possible, but as practical. There’s no conflict between using tables for layout and providing a good RSS feed — just the opposite, it’s a very way to serve content in a format appropriate to a particular output medium.

It’s complete BS to claim that the (new) standards are unequivocally better than (the old standard) circa-1999 techniques. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Within the same project. Within the same page. For example, altho it’s a paragon of new-standards compliance, I can’t stand to read Chris Pirillo’s site — it’s completely unusable to me as a Web site, cuz his choice of typeface, while amusing for about 5 secs, it damn near illegible. But he has an RSS feed, so I’ll access his content that way. New-standards didn’t get me a good experience on his site. OTOH, there are any number of sites that are ugly under the hood — I prolly won’t look at their source for inspiration, but get plenty of value from the content they publish.

Lynx users are perhaps outside the audience LG is most concerned to serve. It’s BS that Google is basically a Lynx front-end to an indexer; Google et al use a number of standard identifiable elements found in all flavors of HTML to index, rank, and display results. Badly-marked-up sites rank high on Google all the time. It’s actually a great argument against the Semantic Web — the better inference engines do a good job without “semantic markup” and RDF and all the rest. Hard to argue with success!!

So, again, I’d say, just as you don’t criticize WordPress for how it’s built, but praise it for its output, so too with LockerGnome. There’s no conflict in a Java guru using PHP software to write his blog, or track his bugs — a good developer uses tools appropriate to the job, not according to religious mandates (this is how I justify working in an all-MS shop Similarly, there’s no conflict in getting good Web development advice from a site that doesnt implement all the techniques it writes about. In fact, it’s an object lesson in the fact that there are no absolutes, but a spectrum of advantages and disadvantages. Be thoughtful, as the LG people obviously were, and tnen pick the approach that gets you to your goal.

For those of us who have to work in the real world, the best argument is that we have to work in th real world. That means making informed, rational decisions, not swallowing whatever the standards mullahs are proclaiming.

Thing is, I’m generally on the side of the majority of you who are advocating the (new-)standards approach. But zealotry gets me every time; it triggers some deep impulse in me to take the contrarian view. Get off the high horse. Lead thru example yourselves, rather than throwing rocks at people who don’t rise to your expectations.