Flower Drum Song | Main | Decaf Frapucinno With Your Protest, Sir?

January 15, 2003

Mark Pilgrim: "Standards are bullshit"

Mr. Pilgrim is unhappy with the state of XHTML. Until I read a followup from him, the dropped <cite> tag had me pretty worked up, too:

"I know, I know, XHTML 2.0 isn’t meant to be backwardly compatible. But damn it, I’ve done everything the W3C has ever recommended. I migrated to CSS because they told me it would work better with the browsers and handheld devices of the future, then the browsers and handheld devices of the future came out and my site looked like shit. I migrated to XHTML 1.1 because they told me to use the latest standards available, and it bought me absolutely nothing except some MIME type headaches and (I am not making this up) Javascript incompatibilities. I migrated to semantic markup that has been around for 10 fucking years and they go and drop it. Not deprecate it slowly over time, mind you, but just fucking drop it. Which means that, after keeping up with all the latest standards, painstakingly marking up all my content, and validating every last page on my site, I’m still stuck in a dead end."

His lament ends with "Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant. I’ve migrated to HTML 4."

(Via Flutterby)