This blog entry is in english. Yet english is not my native language (italian is), so bear some indulgence with typos or grammatical mistakes. Also, I have been told that I write complex things - whether this is good or bad I don't know: but so, if you are unfamiliar with complex prose you may see grammatical errors not only where there could be some, but also where just a prose you're not acquainted with is. Native speakers with an A+ grade in english say my english, obviously not perfect, imports no major issues. Lend a deaf ear to the errors, vocally disagree with my thesis if you want, but enjoy the style all the while.
TO THE FIRST PART- All the sites flagged as «invalidated!», obviously did not validate!
With the exclamation mark as the W3C parser adds, to convey the righteous sense of urgency and emphasis that such grievous an issue involves for all those dumb humans that were visiting such resources, and who yet never realized the dangers they were being exposed to. For these resources weren't valid, while these humans none the less went on browsing them smoothly and with such temerity!
At least till September 2005, fully within the Era Of The Standards, they did not validate! And yet they have been online and viewed since ever! You may even find out that what validates has often simple layout exigencies.
Or, as the W3 puts it itself:Validity is one of the quality criteria for a Web page, but there are many others. In other words, a valid Web page is not necessarily a good web page, but an invalid Web page has little chance of being a good web page.
For that reason, the fact that the W3C Markup Validator says that one page passes validation does not mean that W3C assesses that it is a good page. It only means that a tool (not necessarily without flaws) has found the page to comply with a specific set of rules. No more, no less.Are they serious?
On such grounds, we could as well make rules of any kind, provide worldwide widespread tools for checking compliance with them, and icons to brag about it and whose usage we do not discourage, and yet maintain that this all was meant to signify «No more, no less» than compliance with just «a set of rules» whatever although specific, specific although whatever - and then in the same line empower these rules whatever with the no longer whatever capacity to identify any webpage that does not follow them as a page having little chance of being a good web page - no more, and no less.
It self referentially apodictically ordains and establishes that validity is a quality criterion; it denies its authority to provide any quality judgement; it imparts with all its authority an actual good/bad aesthetic or ethic pair driven quality judgement founded on the valid/invalid technical pair; and in the throes of these contradictions it exonerates itself and waves goodbye: exeunt.
The embarrassment and the temptation are betrayed and uncovered.
At W3C they are the first to sense the surfacing of something deeply flawed, and awkwardly attempt to cope with it like a bad programmer or a poor writer that endlessly works around a bad line, rather than drawing the entailed consequence and rethink the jeopardized whole from scratch.
They know as much as I do that validity cannot found quality in the least; yet they also feel that a validity that can found no longer quality, is fatally meaningless and dead rule walking.
Whatever portion of an explicit or implicit power to seal a quality patent, however furtively or openly accrued, carries with itself a command and a potential set of future benefits that humans do not forfeit gladly
Of course, this is not the case, because in a gentlemen's agreement unbinding verbal reassurances, as the ones we read, suffice.
And the fact the W3C parser sports a showy logo saying «Quality Assurance» should not mislead you into believing that they are undertaking de facto a campaign which may end up releasing exactly such patents as a matter of fact, although not as a matter of intention.
Of course, they aren' t. Of course, this is not what is going on. Of course, the quality that the logo insures is not that of the parsed website: but being the logo a trademark, the alluded quality is that of the parser which, being W3C made, assures itself of its own quality before its own maker, and only a disturbed lunatic might suspect it was meant differently.
Therefore, that «Quality Assurance» is not at risk of imperiling with a quality judgement and with its connected W3C stamp, the quality reputation of a site that ends up declared invalid.
This all goes without saying.
Yet all the same we see that, unable to relinquish an unwarrantable claim, they are bound to uphold it while it crumbles.
Unable to desert validity without witnessing the collapse of a part of their own (otherwise fair) mission upon which they have laid so much expectation and invested so much clout, they attempt to determine which could yield first by odds and trials, and sit back awaiting the outcome and hoping for a favourable one: could we take them out of the misery of these intellectual pangs, and allow the answer the dilemma loudly spells for itself, namely that this type of validation is fundamentally (if not altogether entirely) insignificant, and can be neglected without aftermath at any moment?
Either we have taught a wrong lesson, or we have used a hopelessly blunt tool.
You browse below and ascertain for yourself how many sites, accordingly to W3 validity, have collected for a decade «no more, no less» than so many and so considerable chances of «little chance of being a good web page».
And if they were to be made by sorcery all compliant tomorrow, it does not change the historical fact they have been fully and quite successfully used by just whomever till today; and this while held as not marginally or incidentally but generously, copiously and profusely W3C-parser invalid labeled resources fit to trigger downfalls of errors: - Validate Keio University invalidated! (reported as «General W3C Contact Information» (found on September 11, 2005) at About W3C: Contact.
Evidence:
- November 2006: a note.
Since a few days the validator reports as valid some sites it invalidated previously, when this list was arranged. This happens because the validator now assigns a valid page tag to a page also if it launches validation warnings - which are still reported and that previously invalidated the page.
Do you know what it means? That the W3C, noticing it was invalidating the whole of the internet that matters and that doesn't too, decided that it is no longer the page what must meet the validation criteria, but the validation that must meet the page. Funny compromise, isn't it? At any rate, an implicit confirmation of the arguments here expounded. - Validate National Institute Of Standards And Technology invalidated!
- Validate CNN invalidated!
- Validate LookSmart invalidated!
- Validate Yahoo invalidated!
- Validate Google invalidated!
- Validate Lycos invalidated!
- Validate Netscape invalidated!
- Validate Excite invalidated!
- Validate Altavista invalidated!
- Validate Tiscali invalidated!
- Validate AOL invalidated!
- Validate Vatican (Holy See) invalidated!
- Validate BuddhaNet invalidated!
- Validate Philanthropy com invalidated!
- Validate NoLogo org «Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies» invalidated!
- Validate Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations invalidated!
- Validate Food and Drug Administration (this validates: so is it doing a better job than the UN?)
- Validate Usa Pacifist Party invalidated!
- Validate Usa Republican Party invalidated!
- Validate Usa Democratic Party invalidated!
- Validate Usa Green Party invalidated!
- Validate World Socialist Party invalidated!
- Validate Wrox publisher invalidated!
- Validate Sams publisher invalidated!
- Validate McGraw-Hill publisher invalidated!
- Validate Sybex publisher invalidated!
- Validate ZiffDavis publisher invalidated!
- Validate Dover publisher invalidated!
- Validate Apache invalidated!
- Validate AllExperts com invalidated!
- Validate Ask Jeeves invalidated!
- Validate Nonags invalidated!
- Validate Tucows invalidated!
- Validate Pretty Good Privacy org invalidated!
- Validate Robotics invalidated!
- Validate Intel invalidated!
- Validate Logitech invalidated!
- Validate Epson invalidated!
- Validate Canon invalidated!
- Validate Nikon invalidated!
- Validate XML com invalidated!
- Validate XML org invalidated!
- Validate Friend Finder invalidated!
- Validate Mirc com invalidated!
- Validate Winzip invalidated!
- Validate Html.it invalidated!
- Validate Irfan View invalidated!
- Validate Adobe invalidated!
- Validate American Association for the Advancement of Science invalidated!
- Validate American Cancer Society invalidated!
- Validate WWF invalidated!
- Validate Olympic Games org invalidated!
- Validate The Activist Network invalidated!
- Validate Stanford Computer Science Department invalidated!
- Validate Donald Knuth's (the algorithms guru) homepage invalidated!
- Validate Greenpeace invalidated!
- Validate NBC invalidated!
- Validate ABC invalidated!
- Validate Ebay com invalidated!
- Validate PC World invalidated!
- Validate CNET com invalidated!
- Validate Lockergnome invalidated!
- Validate BBC uk invalidated!
- Validate China View (Xinhuanet english) invalidated!
- Validate Tech Whack India invalidated!
- Validate Web User uk invalidated!
- Validate Information Week invalidated!
- Validate Mac World invalidated!
- Validate Linux org invalidated!
- Validate Oracle com invalidated!
- Validate Motorola com invalidated!
- Validate Softpedia com invalidated!
- Validate Beta News com invalidated!
- Validate Blog Critics org invalidated!
- Validate Geek com invalidated!
- Validate Hewlett-Packard invalidated!
- Validate Disney com invalidated!
- Validate Ryan Air com invalidated!
- Validate History Channel invalidated!
- Validate Web Pro News invalidated!
- Validate Monster com invalidated!
- Validate Dice com invalidated!
- Validate Blogger com invalidated!
- Validate Search Secuirty com invalidated!
- Validate National Geographic invalidated!
- Validate Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers invalidated!
- Validate Nokia invalidated!
- Validate Visa invalidated!
- Validate American Express invalidated!
- Validate Cuban Official Agency Of News invalidated!
- Official Homepage - Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea invalidated!
- Validate Symantec invalidated!
- Validate McAfee Virsu Info invalidated! (note: the front page would validate, all the rest does not: but it is for the rest that we go, not for the front page.)
- Validate Red Cross invalidated!
- Validate Amnesty International invalidated!
- Validate Scientology invalidated!
- Validate United Nations invalidated!
- Validate United Nations Children's Fund invalidated!
- Validate Central Intelligence Agency invalidated!
- Validate FBI invalidated!
- Validate National Security Agency (this validates: so the National Security Agency is better than the Cia, the FBI, and the United Nations)
- Validate Eweek invalidated!
- Validate Match com invalidated!
- Validate Encyclopedia Britannica Online invalidated!
- Validate Wikipedia * (this validates: so Wikipedia is better than the Encyclopedia Britannica)
- Validate Webreference invalidated!
- Validate Napster invalidated!
- Validate 20th Century FOX invalidated!
- Validate Cosmopolitan invalidated!
- Validate PHP net invalidated!
- Validate Open Source org invalidated!
- Validate Macromedia invalidated!
- Validate Qualcomm invalidated!
- Validate Honda com invalidated!
- Validate Mercedes Benz com invalidated!
- Validate Usa Parliament online invalidated!
- Validate French Parliament online invalidated!
- Validate German Parliament online invalidated!
- Validate European Parliament online (this validates: so it is better than the French, German, and Usa Congress)
- Validate PERL com invalidated!
- Validate Python org invalidated!
- Validate
Webmasterpoint org invalidated! - Validate Dynamic Drive invalidated!
- Validate Penguin Books invalidated!
- Validate Shakespeare com invalidated!
- Validate Gutenberg org (this validates: so is its Shakespeare any better than that at Shakespeare.com?)
- Validate MIT edu invalidated!
- Validate
University Of Stanford invalidated! - Validate
University Of Harvard invalidated! - Validate University Of Berkeley invalidated!
- Validate University of Oxford (this validates: so is it any better than Berkeley, Harvard, and Stanford?)
- Validate Evolt invalidated!
- Validate Jakob Nielsen's Useit dot com invalidated!
- Validate A List Apart
(this validates, and is mostly textual: so is it any better than Evolt or more accessible and usable than Jakob Nielsen uh?) - Validate Scientific American invalidated!
- Validate New York Times invalidated!
- Validate Reuters invalidated!
- Validate Guardian co uk invalidated!
- Validate Forbes invalidated!
- Validate Arab News invalidated!
- Validate Telegraph UK invalidated!
- Validate BusinessWeek invalidated!
- Validate British Airways invalidated!
- Validate Lufthansa Airways invalidated!
- Validate Texas Instruments invalidated!
- Validate Amazon invalidated!
- Validate Apple invalidated!
- Validate Playboy invalidated!
- Validate Le Monde france invalidated!
- Validate Le Figaro france invalidated!
- Validate Der Spiegel germany invalidated!
- Validate La Repubblica italy invalidated!
- Validate Herald Tribune International invalidated!
- Validate The Times invalidated!
- Validate Newsweek invalidated!
- Validate Time invalidated!
- Validate Samsung invalidated!
- Validate A Random Mozilla Documentation invalidated!
- Validate Sun Microsystem invalidated!
- Validate This current document invalidated!
- Validate Microsoft (this validates: so is it any better than all the rest?)
- Validate W3C (this validates: so is it any better than all the rest?)
- Validate Opera (this validates: so is it any better than all the rest?)
- Validate Firefox (this validates: so is it any better than all the rest?)
- Of course, this list has been made time ago, precisely from
September 10 to September 12, 2005.
If by chance a site is reported as valid, please do not infer too conveniently
that my thesis is a fantasy: just try more than once, if that would be
the case. I am not inventing.
This, letting alone the fact that, as I already stated, even if all these sites would be made by wizardry compliant overnight, this would not change the fact they have been fully invalid and yet successfully browsed for a decade at least.
It has also been argued by standard compliance supporters that never miss an occasion to complain about the invalidations of the others or any chance to point out webmasters to the W3C validator, that the list above fails to report the type of errors that trigger the invalidations.
This argumentative golem trails along like this: it says there have been discovered alleged top class invalidations, to be now most urgently and abruptly distinguished from less distinguished invalidations of (I guess) a stultified range.
Abruptly, because this is a distinction that, of course, the W3C applies not, ever; its outcome is binary: either validated or invalidated, and, as previously seen, «an invalid page has little chances of being a good web page».
Yet once on these shores, namely facing the list I provided above, the above reported strong worded sentence curiously does not hold true anymore.
It is suddenly discovered, in fact, that a differentiation among invalidations is now badly needed a feature, never mentioned at any earlier stage because nefariously overlooked, and yet all the while tacitly implied: so tacitly, as a matter of fact, that it went never openly stated in the least, and never invoked even once when on safer grounds.
And would you dare argue now that it is not quite much of tacit an implication, the implication which was so implicated that couldn't emerge from the tangle of its taciturnity until a sword cut free its tongue to shout?
When on safer grounds, on the contrary, the strictest abidance with W3C guidelines was patronized as a sublimely not negotiable exigency and demand, worth of affording years of broadsides at Internet Explorer because it didn't sport full compliance with so pivotal rules.
Quite misleading an accusation, firstly because you just have to click on a link to see the full report and extent of the errors: those links link the validation of the sites, not just the sites.
Are you using this file, and lending to it some of the consideration it clearly deserves, or are you in a hurry to prove it wrong heated and hastened by the tide of the eerie sensation you could not prove it wrong at the end of your run?
But, secondly and most importantly, this accusation is misleading for the double standards ridden implication it surreptitiously insinuates.
One of the implied ideas is that, having discovered this unforeseen necessity to differentiate, therefore some hypothetical and untried successful validations somewhere deeper in the structures of the linked websites can be conjectured - and henceforth assumed as a fact; and if the presence of these clandestine validations would be proved (or conjured, arguably going on conjecturing hard enough) this could make up for the invalidation of those websites' front pages.
Needless to say, the burden of this proof has been shift squarely on my shoulders by validation supporters, because the fact I have proved my point but I have not taken care to prove their conjecture too (right or wrong, both play in their hands), has been blamed as a demerit of my list, rather than as an evidence either of their negligence or of their impotence to prove their own case.
They really mean, without a blink of the eye, that in order to prove that, say, Yahoo does not validate, it is not enough that its first pages already don't: I would have had to validate all the billions of pages it is made of, the whole of it or nothing of it: in other words, they imply that validation has grown close to nearly metaphysical a process that escapes feasible scientific experimental trial, because not even the most well equipped laboratory with the best supercomputing facilities could ever validate within a humanly acceptable span of time all the pages online - and then aggregate the results with data mining.
Validation becomes like the immaculate conception of Mary, a matter of faith that begets perfect laws without tampering with the human all too human: far too sublime to be grasped, far too high to be assessed, far too venerable to be judged, far too complex to tolerate the insult of bowing before Galilean science, it can't be really subjected to worldwide consolidated experimentability guidelines.
The W3C is a god, it partakes of the archetype of the tables of the law givers: its Deuteronomy * is immune to mundane, too mundane, rules; and rightfully it collects all the awed reverences and all the blind loyalties any idol does.
But once we are for validation, either we are for validation wholesale, or we are not for it any longer.
No need to look any further, then.
In fact we cannot be for validation being for half of that validation, for a slice of validation, for a validation's crumb, or for a staggering validation, or for a chequered validation, a validation that applies to scattered hypothetical internal links, but not to the most prominent element of every site: its front page.
You might end up with the additional delusion of finding out that the providential sample you are scrambling for may not exist - because who would fail a front page validation, only in order to comply with validation guidelines in some internal far fetched pages, if not by chance rather than by compliance? By purpose, only a lunatic would.
Whereas the one which would further prove my case instead does exists, and is rife, representing this latter quite natural (and not unnatural) a combination: sites that validate in the front page, but not in several internal pages: should we talk of sweeping the dirt under the red carpet? You decide.
However you do, your line of "reasoning" will end up disqualifying, paradoxically, the sites that validate at least in the front page, without rescuing those that don't. Nice shot, bud: right on your foot.
And perhaps most significantly, I do not even care why or for which errors the W3C declares a site invalid: invalid is invalid, and I do not allege that the criterion that best describes what is invalid and what is not, should be some other criterion than the one the W3C has been wantonly employing on a daily basis and on a worldwide scale for years till today (2005) to come out exactly with that result.
We can't, in the name of compliance with the W3C, discriminate between the case of errors that the W3C reports as such, and the case of errors that, well, yes, it reports as such and yet should be no longer considered as such, or precisely as such, although (alas!) the W3C says they are precisely such, and although it uses them to yield one same undiscriminating sentence fit for all cases: «not valid!» - with an exclamative mark.
We cannot even say that since (to pick one) Canon yields just a few errors, this should institute any difference: once Excite yields 300 errors and Yahoo too, the fact Canon produces less than them is not the line of reasoning that defends this validation, but that contradicts it more: because when we speak of the internet, we speak much more in the declension of the Excite and of the Yahoos than in that of Canon and Linux or Epson.
So, what matters if some sites like those have less errors, none the less errors and none the less still invalid, when the reasoning is doomed to short circuiting anyway, casting sparkles all around from every edge?
And however, we cannot be more presidential than the President himself: the W3C says one error suffices.
Therefore how many errors is enough errors, when the W3C says one error is enough to be declared invalid?
One, ten, fifty, fifty-three, one hundred. Why not ten thousand then?
Let's invent a mortgaged validation, to rescue a broken validation.
And if validation supporters can't find more fabric for their cause, or fail a validation themselves, let's set an exception that, in the name of a differentiation by themselves never tolerated before, authorizes a discrimination for their very special case: a special case that can't accommodate their thesis any longer.
Where should we align the threshold of this ephemeral last shadow line of defense of the maximum allowed errors? And since the W3C has not set it up, who should, once we imply it would exist but no one has ever seen it? Maybe me? Or perhaps you?
We cannot be purists who sponsor the importance of validation when we like it, and indulgent when we don't: such are luxuries that those who started with intransigence can't afford. Either you win this game or you lose it, likewise either you validate or you don't.
Almost validated is like almost famous, and if you are left with this, you're defending a wreck: you are in Alamo, man.
These positions are not defensible, preserving intellectual honesty too.
The mere fact they are raised none the less, proves to what lengths of intellectual abdication this epidemic that supports a mistake can go and indeed has gone.
We can't apply two different rules to the W3C, the one that sponsors compliance upholding it as a valuable goal, and the one that condones the lack of it, in order to declare, adding insult to injury, that the latter dialectical procedure is nothing less than still one more evidence in favor of the importance of the compliance that was not there:«And I thank thee, King,
For Thy great bounty, that not only giv'st
Me cause to wail, but teaches me the way
How to lament the cause.»
(Shakespeare, Richard II)Validation supporters, when pushed into this Alamo, refuse to draw the entailed conclusion their own contradictions suggest, and they seem to believe that the best way to serve standards and the W3C is to defend them into every single error of theirs.
There is a word for this: fundamentalism, if fanaticism is a name you don't like.
But the fact is, validation as it is today is invalidating the whole of the internet that matters, and the W3C is declaring all the most successful websites of the net as having, «no(thing) less no(thing) more», than «little chances of being a good webpage».
The chorus of the webmasters and Css fanatics and Internet Explorer bashers who use those sites everyday, concurs with the W3C - and sees no contradiction.
This is what's happening: this madness, this craziness under the broadlight of an open sun; and this is what an obscure man like me keeps denouncing, crying in this wilderness.
Validation as it has been arranged till today, makes no sense whatsoever, and both validation and the process that leads to W3C recommendations are exposed as badly in need of a complete rehearsal, and badly in need to be rethought thoroughly.
As they are today, they are hopelessly pointless.
Which comes as no surprise, actually: because when a recipe produces so many bad supporters like our Css fanatics, as we see them performing everyday on blogs and on newsgroups, it already spells the cook must have produced a rotten dish.
No good cause can generate so much nonsense so unflinching before errors, so many yes-men and yes-women as its standard followers and devotees, and so copious logic bankruptcy as the shared characteristic of their arguments.
We program for carbon
human beings walking «in the land of the living», because «who can sing your praises in the land of the dead»? We do not program even interfaces for silicon
machines only.
And our websites have been meant to to be read and loved by
human eyes online, not read and approved by
parsers online.
Once met the designated requirement, all the rest pulverizes fading away into
Scheol.
It is not just a matter of absent contents meant as
scarce or slim textual feeds.
The
abysmally low quality of the contents of so many blogs, ranging from
so common and so shallow collections of
pet pictures to digests of open loathing, from summaries of eventless days unworthy recounting to anyone to plain and recurrent vulgarity (
example), is
equipotent in its
legacy and
effects to having
no contents
at all.
Because there is
no subjectivity of judgement in such evaluation, when we see
the majority of the existing blogs
brimming with patent and unquestionable
profanity (in many cases aimed precisely at IE -
example: "shit" and "standards" as plausible partners-, in innumerable others at political opponents), spreading
irreprehensible lessons in hate, and yet, with their curses still on their lips and their posts about the wildlife of blue penguins in Congo, laying a
coexisting claim to
impeccable orthodoxy and to
refined and
classy Css
delicacies and dainties.
Can the banality of this evil be transfixed into a
starry dome via the
cover up of ceremonial standards observance that
amnesties all, as if it were the requirement on top of all requirements, the prescription on top of all prescriptions?
Alleged
sterling Css and
slovenly contents cannot go in the
same line or page hoping that the former will
transfigure the latter, hinting or even professing all the while that the W3C would have ever
surreptitiously meant to
second and accredit this type of matches as what the internet is
encouraged to be about.
The W3C sits mum on this account, while these
misleading and misled receipts of
its own recommendations so clearly
unravel under its eyes.
Of course, syndication of contents isn't supposed to be its job. But should this mean
we other end front developers should sit mum as well, and suppose it isn't
ours, and that we have
no stake into this pandemic
degradation under the
sacramental chrisms of Css
conformity?
It is true that the bottom line of a paradigm without presentation
converges at the
.txt file.
But the bank against which these proud breakers shatter and ebb is:
how much sense does it do pursuing a presentation with compliance in order to say
little more or
nothing else but it, or in order to array
compilations of insults and vilification?
And if we allege we agree it makes
none,
why then we can be found so frequently
advocating it precisely as having it
momentously?
And
how much is it relevant pursuing compliance till the bitter end, once you have committed
already your most significant (or insignificant) contents?
And if
then it hasn't that sovereign bearing anymore, why are we so
invariably found perorating it precisely as such?
When on some popular blogs we are
counseled that there is a set of reasons not to implement a certain feature in a certain mode, and that within such reasons is listed the warning that "
most importantly, it violates the
rule of separation between contents and presentation", what is missing in the author's comprehension is that respecting a
rule ought to be expressed as a function, not as a value in
itself that may retain a score and any meaning whatsoever when standing on the only footing of
its own right.
What we have verified is that the author understands there is an
importance in such separation, but does
not understand that it is not in the most, but
in the least.
Format is for dishing up the contents, not the contents for the purpose of
sporting a nicely embroidered format that exploits its contents as a
decoy or as an ill tolerated
parasite bothering the entrails of the
format itself and of its priorities.
What went so much astray, and
how and
why and
when, that an intention clearly meant to teach the one thing, has been taken by
so ample a community of end front developers as meaning for granted its
exact opposite?
They seem to think the separation between contents and format has been implemented so to
discard the separated contents, and to
install the
format as a
ruler on the
so emptied whole Kingdom.
Is that a
mental bug we shall have to take
finally seriously, and
fix?
As somebody said Artificial Intelligence in no match for
Natural Stupidity, and I wonder whether this is
precisely our case: should
Formatdom be
allowed to become
the emblem of social online distinction and preeminence for
e-dandies and DTD/DOM spoiled scions it has already become, and therefore let them
belittle (
example (I was not in the thread)) and
mock at all the rest?
Of course, they
spit at your face with the
best of the intentions:
anointed to the
no profit quest of «not to spread
false information» throughout the developers' community and thus extol its reputation and commonwealth, they just mean nothing else than being
helpful and
educational.
Have you thanked them long enough for so disinterested a commitment to
preserve the standard?
They make a sport of compliance with the standards. They flash it as
badge, as if it were a Purple Hearth to slap at the face of the unfaithful onlookers and of the unbelievers.
They even complain at times that
Google too is not compliant ( «
Google.com doesn't validate», «
Google isn't Html compliant», «
Berkeley University site doesn't validate», «
mozilla.org does not validate properly (Soviet secret services involved)»), after having had a look at its
html source codes.
Swarms of developers that, wielding a
made in w3c wooden dagger, believe they are no longer the hoard of barbarians they are, but newly installed
baronets via Css edicts and the pat of a Css selector on the shoulders, and that like Lilliputians hurl their
layouts and Css floating layers at giants like
Google and
Microsoft saying to them they ought to learn
how to program properly.
Is that meant to be a
joke?
No, it is said in all seriousness, and often in a rage and
hatred: and that's the
tragedy within the comedy.
Compliance is a
false goal. Particularly
Full Compliance.
It may be good for adolescents who are in search of a
cheap way to show off a website with
no other virtues. But full compliance has nothing good in
itself. That is: it is not that, paraphrasing Descartes, "
I comply, therefore I am".
You can pursue full compliance if you wish, but I still find entirely irrelevant a site whose contents, like so
many blogs of
Css fanatics, are nearly non existent and whose only virtue they flaunt is "
This website is compliant with xhtml": they have nothing in it, but it is compliant - indeed, with the
void it so well
expresses.
Compliance
could be a good
start,
is actually but a
medium, and
never it should become an
expected conclusion to which all must conform
promptly and
integrally or worse and woes to the disbelievers.
Compliance can be a starting offset, but
nowhere a
goal.
Yet it has been mistaken
precisely as such.
When we start neglecting the contents and complying with
abstract guidelines, we're no longer working
for human beings. But
only once we have worked for human beings in the first degree, we have done
all that the internet is about, and we can say: «
Ite, missa est».
Compliance
then may also
follow with no more importance than an academic frill for your personal card to hand over to
those who may care about it or who are susceptible to get impressed by titles and honors of no substance, and whom you decide
worth of being impressed.
PhD and stuff: as Margaret Thatcher once said "Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to
tell people you are,
you aren't".
If all your worth stays
with your compliance, you're worth of very
little.
Your
idol has eyes, but it can't see; it has hands, but it can't reach; and it has ears, but it can't listen to you. It's a
standard idol
indeed: for all idols, since ever, have had
all the good appearances and yet
no spirit.
Google is good.
Microsoft too.
Whether either of them is compliant or not with the w3c guidelines is something that doesn't bother me in the least as the
excruciating riddle it seems to be for
so many others.
When I go Google, I go there having in mind other things than
viewing their source codes and whistle appreciatively at
what refined a Css or XHTML aristocrat they may have been
today - which
of course, being at
Google very intelligent developers, they never cared
too much to prove to us they would have ever been or even meant to be.
Compliance comes second.
Compliance as a value is an
abstraction no one really needs in order to make a
good job:
that is, you don't tell a
good job out of
mere compliance, unless you're a
bad judge.
Once a site is well done as Google is, compliance is a goal I do not require any longer when surfing it, and not in the least with
strictures.
Webpages are made for
humans, compliance for machines. I still prefer having in mind the
former as first, and the latter as the
eternal second they ought to be.
Standards are like the Sabbath: they were made for men, not men for standards.
Also the w3c at times implements absurdities; think of the deprecation of
innerHTML: what is the net gain I cash from a standard, if the gain it gives to me by producing the standard, is
continuously eroded by what it takes away from me later on by
deprecating what was not
indispensable to deprecate?
And are we aware we
could be delivering the
creativity of the web to what could become a
bureaucracy?
The w3c now
seems to believe the new "
node driven" logic of the DOM2 and DOM3 is the
Holy Grail of web programming, and
all must be
levered and seasoned for
it. Prepare the roads, for the Lord is coming, and the end of the world is nigh - or, well: at least a
tidbit nigher for sure, isn't it?
I do
not contend the "
node driven" logics' utility: rather on the contrary I
even praise its
beauty because so influenced I can be by what and by how a language performs, that I also appreciate its
aesthetic fascinations besides its utility - provided its charms are not just all it can sport (which is not the case in point).
But we cannot make wasteland around the latest novelty that engrossed our hopes, and remove from the hands of the end front developers also
objectively useful proprieties like innerHTML burning it as holocaust to the god unknown, only because, once again, we have fallen pray of the
eschatological delusion that the
Holy Graal is finally firm in our clutches - or maybe only because
innerHTML was
originally an IE thing, and therefore simply because it was originally such, it always went
tacitly begrudged all the ways up and down.
And certainly we cannot use as a criterion the glee of
css fanatics whose degree of attained objectivity and whose cheers are worth of
Edouard Daladier's notorious aside when he saw crowds welcoming him rather than booing him as he feared, after he signed a pact with the germans: "The blind
fools!".
Microsoft is just like any other human enterprise: it can
learn how to improve, and it can also
teach how to improve.
Those who refuse acknowledging that Microsoft can also teach very good things, so little they feel like paying respects to it, are actually those who pay to it the
undue respects they fear to pay.
Microsoft is not the
Circumlocution Office of Charles Dickens - if any has to be, it's rather the W3C which has symmetries more
exposed to the danger of becoming such a thing. Microsoft is not the
Cosmodaemonic Telegraph Company of Henry Miller. It is not the
Spectre of Ian Fleming. Those who see Adolf Hitler (every)where there is no Hitler, are the ones who will yield to him
first when a
real Hitler shows up: exactly because they
proved they don't know how to spot his features.
Microsoft is only a human venture, transient like all the rest of us and of them, which one day will end with us like all the
rest of us, and which till that day can be both wrong and right,
equally and impartially, and entitled to make mistakes without being
crucified onto each of them, and to make bright moves without being too conveniently
ignored or
despised for them.
Because we
won't build any better internet, go figure a world, out of such a frame of mind. The no global world, is
no world.
On the same grounds, those who respect the w3c for the sake of the standards, should also be able to criticize it respectfully, for the sake of the very
same standards they defended earlier, when the w3c takes a wrong turn. Or we might one day end up with a w3c that would look like the UN: you wipe out 10 floors out of the 20 of its magnificent building, and
nothing happens.
If you look at how things
appear, you may also be induced into believing that you succor the W3C
better when you succor it
more. But then, if we look at how things
appear, also the sun spins around the earth rather than
viceversa.
We don't want the w3c to be
The Castle of Kafka: a mysterious impersonal entity busy uttering
incomprehensible orders that no one
understands, but that
all must obey.
You don't want
this.
I don't want
this. And to be sure
we won't have this, we must get
committed not to spread and to teach, wittingly or unwittingly,
exactly this.
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