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1. Pingback: Daily Delicious - FAUST: Flash Augmenting Standards » SOME RANDOM DUDE on February 28, 2007
2. Pingback: All in a days work… on March 4, 2007

1. Don February 28, 2007

   ok I guess

   When I asked Mike why he had to act like he had some noble cause against standardistas, he reminded me of a classic entry from my blog, one which was the whole reason why I stopped reading his blog altogether (I only got their today via a link).

   I like Mike. I get his point. Your’s not so much. Good luck on your last year at Cornell. Take a class on class and diplomacy. It will serve you well. You probably shouldn’t read Mike’s blog any more cause why stress yourself?

2. Mike D. February 28, 2007

   Never before has so much been said about so little. Where to begin, where to begin.

   Let me start with a clerical matter first: please consider modifying the appearance of your titles so I can tell they are actually titles. Looks like body copy plus a point or two to me. I’m a designer and it’s barely even perceptible to my eyes.

   “Why does a simple blog entry mentioning a new Flash technique have to be taken as an opportunity to provoke “standardistas?”

   The answer is that when you’ve been in this industry long enough, you will realize that every innovative technique or bit of creativity pushed forth by trailblazers willing to buck convention is met invariably by people who consider themselves the guardians against the bucking of convention. “Standardistas” — in my book — are not people who like standards. They are people who insist on them at any and all costs. So when I see a technique like this, I always feel like giving a pre-emptive shout out in anticipation of the reaction these sorts of people will have.

   “he reminded me of a classic entry from my blog, one which was the whole reason why I stopped reading his blog altogether”

   That’s actually an entry from my blog you’re talking about, and if you’re calling it “a classic”, I thank you for the huge compliment. It’s interesting to me that that entry caused you to “stop reading my blog altogether” because it was the very first blog entry I wrote after launching my blog in 2004. So, I assume you were either never a reader or you were maybe a longtime reader and just saw that post randomly one day? Anyway…

   “See, the whole point of using an extension of XML to serve websites is to take advantage of the things that can be done with XML… converting documents to information trees, using XML technologies like SVG and MathML, etc.”

   We can already do useful things with the DOM via XML node manipulation. sIFR, Gmail, and many other technologies already do this today. Do you need a valid XHTML document served as XML to do it? Hell no… but you’re operating on the same principles, and it works.

   “And while XHTML has been a standard for years now, it’s just a step towards making HTML look like XHTML…”

   This I agree with you about.

   “So when I see designers and developers using XHTML for everything from basic one-page sites to content management systems used by thousands of people, it really bothers me. I hate it. I know I haven’t said this before because I have tried to be tactful and all, but using XHTML just to publish your blog/portfolio/web store/etc. is pointless. What’s your reason? Why are you doing it? Don’t tell me because you want to practice closing single tags; adding a foward-slash before a right-caret is not that difficult to begin with.”

   Here is where we disagree vehemently. In your mind, if people write XHTML, they are stupid because they’ll never be able to do all you’d like to see done with proper XML. In my mind, it’s simply good practice. It standardizes people on lowercase tags. It standardizes people on trailing slashes. It gets people at least thinking about not being sloppy. What you’re failing to appreciate is that web authoring is still largely a hand-crafted thing… even on the largest of web sites. When the code is first being written, it’s a person doing the writing and that person needs to have the right influences in their head in order to write the best code they can. If you just want to write good HTML instead, that’s fine of course, and many people opt for it, but XHTML disambiguates the situation, which is something I like.

   “Validation and web standards are actually hugely important, but not to your every day web designer.”

   Then don’t get mad when those us of working in the real world on consumer web sites just use validation as a tool and a guide towards best practices. I guess I just don’t see how you can manage to get mad about this and say in the same breath that designers basically have no reason to even give a fuck about standards because the sorts of things they could/should be used for aren’t possible until we’re using real XML. The logic seems entirely spurious to me.

   “Throwing unencoded ampersands on your web page to invalidate markup that shouldn’t be XHTML in the first place doesn’t help at all. It only provokes argument.”

   It provoked discussion at a time when discussion needed to be provoked. Nobody would ever argue with a straight face that it is good practice to purposely invalidate your site.

   “Everyone is doing their part to improve the web… even the standardistas.”

   Trying to improve the web and actually improving the web are two entirely different things, and can even be in opposition to each other, in fact. Many hardliners who think they are doing good things by stifling innovation for the sake of compliance are actually retarding the development of the web in my opinion. I don’t know if you actually remember what things were like in the standardista world several years ago, but the environment was a lot less tolerant than it is now. There was a lot more of the “give me validation or give me death” talk than there is in today’s more progressive, post-modern web development world. Because hardliners realized they could catch more flies with honey, they softened their edges and settled for a world where everyone at least cared about the quality of code they wrote. Caring begats caring, and with enough caring, we’ll all get to a good place eventually. What won’t get us there is following rules for the sake of following rules.

3. Jeroen Mulder February 28, 2007

   The reason why I think personally think validation is important and why I advocate the use of XHTML is purely for education reasons. It’s great that there are people who claim to fully understand the big picture of standards and then deviate from the norm to be I don’t know what, but I don’t care about them. I care about the future — the people who are supposed to do our jobs tomorrow.

   I feel that validation is the perfect tool to function as a starting point for people who are just starting to get serious about web design for the simple reason that it’s very black and white — it’s either right or wrong. In the early days when they do not know everything yet, I rather push them in the right direction by feeding them information that they might disagree with later on, than advocating my personal opinion to them which is bound to confuse them more.

   Afterall, those people employ a simple “monkey see, monkey do” learning method. They need to start somewhere and I rather have them start at the validation of a XHTML document than trying to tell them about the concepts of semantics and whatnot. Realistically, those people more often just want to get it done than get it done well (up to our quality standards). In my opinion, validation and XHTML are often a good black/white starting point for people who want to know more about it.

4. Jermayn Parker February 28, 2007

   Wow followed this from Mikes to your blog and it all sounds interesting.

   The thing that gets me is why code a website that fails validation? I can only see negatives and no real benefit for it.

5. Rob Beagrie February 28, 2007

   I might be wrong here, but I was under the impression that valid XHTML is easier and quicker for browsers to parse than valid HTML, just because of the way tags are organised.

   This is a small issue of course, since parsing times are so low in most cases anyway.

   Another good thing about XHTML is it makes the data within the page more accessible (to things like mashups or scraping) although whether you would want this is arguable.

6. Christian Montoya February 28, 2007

   Mike: please excuse my late night typos… I can’t believe how bad I write when I’m tired.

   Rob: XHTML interpreted as text/html is not any faster than HTML. Also, many people who think they are serving XHTML correctly are still making mistakes that wouldn’t work in an XHTML parser, even if the validator accepts them.

   Jermayn: I guess it’s part of Mike’s attempt at proving a point, but I see the underlying “point” as being flawed… which is what I’m trying to say here.

   Don: “take a class on class” — I don’t find that funny.

   Mike: Yes, it was right after your blog launched that I decided not to read it. As for standardistas stifling innovation, I don’t think that’s fair. I think quite a few standardistas have been part of bringing innovation to what we do, and I applaud them for working with the tools we have now. Have you ever heard of Faust? I think it’s one example of standardistas doing something very positive.

   The thing is, even though some standardistas may act very much opposed to new techniques, it’s good to have them around. Otherwise we would settle for mediocre solutions rather than trying to found the most acceptable and inter-operable ones. I’m still trying to get people to stop using background pictures for links… that makes me a standardista but I’m only doing it because I think there are better ways.

   As for hand-crafted code, I don’t think XHTML was intended to be written by hand… I think it was intended to be generated by software, like a CMS or web app would do. Handing XHTML over to a client for a consumer web site doesn’t make much sense.

   And as for preparing for an XML future, one of the points I was trying to make here is that most likely, the next technology on the web will be HTML 5, not another iteration of XHTML. When that comes around, what does it matter if you are prepared to write more XML? HTML 5 is intended for people who work on the web every day… take a look at XHTML 2 and compare it to HTML 5 and ask yourself which one you would rather use.

   And as for starting the discussion, I do commend you on that but I think a lot of people took it the wrong way… almost as if validation is completely useless.

   Lastly, to be honest it doesn’t really make me mad to see XHTML sites served as text/html, because then I would be mad all the time, but I guess I’m just trying to encourage discussion here

7. Mike D. February 28, 2007

   I think quite a few standardistas have been part of bringing innovation to what we do, and I applaud them for working with the tools we have now.

   Agreed. I just don’t call these people standardistas. The suffix “-ista” is defined as “denoting a person associated with a particular activity, often with a derogatory intent”. I instead call these people “great developers” and “industry leaders”. The people who go around barking about harmless things other people are doing I call standardistas. And as for validatorians, well, I made that word up myself :).

   The thing is, even though some standardistas may act very much opposed to new techniques, it’s good to have them around.

   No problem with that, as long as they are civil, reasonable, and practical in their approaches. Some are. Some are not.

   As for hand-crafted code, I don’t think XHTML was intended to be written by hand… I think it was intended to be generated by software

   If it was intended to be generated by software than why is it ascii and so easily human readable and human writeable? It might as well just be binary, like .swfs, if it is only to be generated by machines. It can be much smaller that way, can be checked for errors at compile time, and can be made to prevent theft. It was designed to be crafted by humans because that’s the reality of the way the web works today. The only reason hundreds of thousands of weekenders and pros alike are able to cobble together what we now view as “the web” is because it’s so easy to learn (X)HTML and then write it.

   Handing XHTML over to a client for a consumer web site doesn’t make much sense.

   Again, it doesn’t make much of a positive difference but it doesn’t make much of a negative difference either, so who cares? I see from the last sentence of your comment that you at least keep yourself from getting mad about it now.

   And as for starting the discussion, I do commend you on that but I think a lot of people took it the wrong way

   Yes, many did.

8. Rob Beagrie February 28, 2007

   True, but if you are already writing XHTML it would be much easier to take advantage of serving the code as application/xhtml+xml once support for this becomes more widespread.

9. Christian Montoya February 28, 2007

   Rob: That’s a serious misconception. There is a big difference between “valid” code, which the w3 validator verifies, and “well-formed,” which is required for actual XML rendering. I’m not going to restate things that have already been said elsewhere, but many XHTML documents, if actually served as application/xhtml+xml (which you can do today) wouldn’t work. This is because the DOM behaves differently when rendered as application/xhtml+xml, and text data is treated differently. For the specific reasons, read: http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml.

   Mike: Yes, it’s human readable, and it’s human writable, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the ideal choice. Even XML isn’t infinitely popular, and that’s why people have been advocating things like JSON and YAML for human writable tree documents.

   I think the error-fixing properties of SGML-based HTML aren’t something we should throw out the window just to have prettier markup. HTML is great because it works even when the markup is invalid, and hacking XHTML just to keep that feature is flawed. When you are really using XHTML like it is meant to be used, that error-fixing isn’t available, and it becomes much more necessary to rely on validating software generators rather than allowing code to be written by hand. I still see HTML as being the right choice for clients who just want to get themselves on the web, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

10. Don February 28, 2007

    It is meant as a helpful comment, constructive criticism. It wasn’t meant to be funny.

11. Alan H. February 28, 2007

    Thanks Montoya and Mike for the throw-down. It was fun to sit ringside, catching the spattering blood.

    At-least we all agree on one thing: We’re all passionate.

    And the winner of the match? This comment:

    “The answer is that when you’ve been in this industry long enough, you will realize that every innovative technique or bit of creativity pushed forth by trailblazers willing to buck convention is met invariably by people who consider themselves the guardians against the bucking of convention. “Standardistas” — in my book — are not people who like standards. They are people who insist on them at any and all costs. So when I see a technique like this, I always feel like giving a pre-emptive shout out in anticipation of the reaction these sorts of people will have.”

12. Alan H. February 28, 2007

    LOL!!! So much for the code suggestions below. A double-dose of DOH! Montoya: Check-out Mike’s Comment Preview.

13. Christian Montoya February 28, 2007

    Alan: I don’t know what you did, but it’s fixed now. I guess Markdown likes to conflict with plain XHTML now and then.

14. Christian Montoya February 28, 2007

    Mike: Okay, titles are bold on individual pages. Thanks for the suggestion.

15. Johan March 2, 2007

    Is talking about any doctype strict or transitional not a more interesting discussion?

16. Christian Montoya March 2, 2007

    No, because validation is only really relevant to XHTML doctypes. HTML is designed to work even if it is invalid, but XHTML served correctly is not.

    Then again, I will have an entry soon about transitional doctypes… stay tuned

17. Jermayn Parker March 2, 2007

    Already beat ya Christian

    I briefly mention how a different doctype can change the validation results and how that could affect your sales pitch.

18. Chris James March 5, 2007

    I dont really see why you’re so opposed to writing xHTML.

    I honestly dont find it any extra effort and there are always benefits to doing it.

    The xHTML strict doctype forces you to seperate style from presentation which has many huge benefits (http://www.csszengarden.com for example). Thats my main reason for using.

    Also i have used it to parse it as XML and use some cool XSL stuff on it. And because I was used to writing XHTML i didnt have to change my coding style at all to do it.

    You say theres no point in writing xHTML, but what exact is the point in not doing it?

19. Christian Montoya March 5, 2007

    Chris, read the article, the answer to your question is there. If you still don’t understand, don’t worry about it.

    But to say that XHTML forces you to separate style from presentation is simply not true. You can make the same table layouts in XHTML as people have been doing with HTML for years, and it happens all the time. There’s nothing a few /> can do to enforce good practices.

20. Fullman March 7, 2007

    Ok, I’ll just say a few things. I agree with both Mike and I agree with you, for different reasons.

    However, as this little rant provided much material to digest, it also provides a few key points to discuss.

    First off, judging a book by its over is never a good practice. Hell, you’ll probably look at my blog, see my first entry about my representing my company at South by Southwest and decide that I’m not worth your time. Granted.

    However, Mike does make a good many points about the sometimes asinine approach to standards and the insanely high expectations some people (and judges in some of these CSS sites) take towards others. It’s just that you (strongly) disagreed with this comments because you’re on the opposite end of the spectrum. That doesn’t invalidate his comments.

    For example, some CSS sites that only consider sites that validate will not consider any site that contains tables… even if said tables contain GASP tabular data! Say it isn’t so, a table being used the way it was actually intended! (I shudder to think how miserable some of these people are in real life when things don’t go their way and they can’t control it.)

    Then again, as Mike said, all it takes is one line, nay, one character to throw off a page and strip it from being fully validated. Sorry, that’s just a bit too wishy-washy. The elitist badge placement saying that their site is validated doesn’t help this process, and if it doesn’t look the way it should (which is subjective, to say the least), these same people suggest the user replace browsers. My God.

    Instead of standardistas (as whoever coined the phrase) going after people attacking the concept of standards, perhaps it would be better to focus on more pressing matters: highly trafficked websites like MySpace, YouTube and others from their gawd-awful markup and shitty rendering.

    Example/Opinion: MySpace wouldn’t be plagued with the poor performance, security issues and excruciating functionality if standards and best practices were actually taken into consideration. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen browsers choke on the code, hold requests open because something just wasn’t formed correctly or tags were left open. The site is often down for many features at any time, slower than reasonable, and is an overall headache. –Yet some big companies like major studios insist on using it as their only form of internet marketing, sometimes replacing an entire website for a movie! Tom didn’t care, Fox doesn’t either, and that’s just the way it is.

    There’s simply too much bickering between the two camps, and this entry helps validate that point. Bickering doesn’t help anyone.

    Get a room you two

21. Christian Montoya March 7, 2007

    “However, Mike does make a good many points about the sometimes asinine approach to standards and the insanely high expectations some people (and judges in some of these CSS sites) take towards others.”

    That’s very true.

    I think the point I’m drifting towards is simply that validation (specifically, XML) isn’t really for 99% of the web design people are doing nowadays (that is, it shouldn’t be such an issue). Yes, clean code is really nice, but I much prefer the flexibility of HTML over the strictness of XHTML. That doesn’t mean validation is not important; it’s extremely important in other applications. Just not on Joe Schmoe’s travel blog.

    I’ve also learned that CSS and (x)HTML are completely different things, and semantics are also a separate discussion as well. I’ve learned that a site with semantic markup and CSS for presentation written with HTML 4.01 Transitional is a lot better than a site with non-semantic markup and table layout written with XHML 1.0 Strict. In essence, the doctype issue is not essential, and it’s simply a matter of which doctypes we shouldn’t use.

    But I still maintain that serving XHTML intentionally invalid, and doing so with an elitist attitude of supposed “enlightenment,” is asinine in itself. That might make me asinine too, but I think the discussion is useful. I also don’t think that we are bickering, but maybe I could be wrong…

22. Fullman March 7, 2007

    Then yes, agreed, XML isn’t ready for the web when it’s used the way we see it today. It took me the longest time to understand where it became practical and where it was just another way of learning to do the same executions HTML already provided.

    I’m all for innovation and learning alternate methods, but heck, if it does the same thing, then it’s just the same thing.

    Now, regarding blogs and validation/XHTML, most blogs nowadays come shipped with those templates, and it does tend to be overkill. We shouldn’t have to follow the web’s version of the 10 Commandments when it comes to blogs, but it’s not killing anyone either.

    I design with Dreaweaver. I’m happy with the way it codes, and as long as you don’t use their built in JavaScript functions, it creates clean, valid code that needs very little-to-no manual tweaking. That said, XHTML 1.0 Transitional is the default, so it automatically codes in that doctype.

    It was bickering, but bickering is just another type of discussion. As long as one person doesn’t run out of the room crying, it’s all good.