This illustrates an important truth: real standards come from what works for real people in the field, not from best guesses by “experts”. Do what needs to be done, and the standards-keepers will follow along … or else go find new standards keepers.
It is immensely hard to get standards right; it’s very useful to have proto-standards like the various flavors of RSS to get the dough rising, but it takes a lot of beating and kneading before it is ready to bake.
— Mike Champion 
I thought this looked familiar…
http://scriptingnews.userland.com/2003/04/18#When:4:01:26AM
“Chewbacca! What a Wookie!”
Reading the original post being spoofed, I can’t help but stop at the line where MSIE is mentioned separately from (in relation to CSS) “buggy browsers.”
Perhaps the spoofed is also a spoof? This hurts my head.
— Jeffe
Yeah, the irony level of calling the non-IE browsers the buggy ones was just too much for anybody over the age of 3 to have actually said it. :)
Win32/Mozilla since 0.9 and proud… :)
http://inessential.com/?comments=1&postid=1668
http://www.evolt.org/article/Does_IE_6_Center_Your_Table_Content/17/15341/
This bug affected virtually every Manila user when IE 6 came out, because of consistently non-standards-compliant templates with standards-compliant DOCTYPEs.
Also, this is fun:
http://www.richinstyle.com/bugs/ie5demo.html
— Mark
I just don’t get why Dave Winer doesn’t get CSS. It’s not exactly rocket science.
Dave Winer is still alive?
Mark, you are my hero. Your post made my day ;-)
I am not a designer, I am not a programmer, I am basically a kid who got bored with Dreamweaver (for (X)HTML and CSS) and knows nothing about XML and the like, but:
This standards debate isn’t anyone’s fault. It seems to be a combination of problems: 1. Really strict standards [ideals] to the point of being rediculious, without a reason to be so; 2. Designers [idealists], like Zeldman and Winer (in their different fields, at their different times), who say ‘Standards are good because they are good’; and 3. People [realists] who say ’standards suck, because I can work around without them, to the point that I don’t even need to know them.’
Why can’t everyone just get along. Why can’t the standards make sense and be easy to meet, so that the people who preach on standards have some rock to stand on and the people who don’t just have look at the standards and say ‘oh, this is gettable, and it makes sense, and I can’t do without it.’
What you (and, apparently, Winer) fail to get is that Winer extols some standards (RSS, OPML, and XML-RPC — all ones that he created or has significant investment in) while eschewing others (HTML, CSS, RDF, SOAP — all ones he doesn’t understand or feels snubbed by). For *years*, he’s been writing various forms of web publishing software, but his products are still incapable of producing valid HTML Strict or any version of XHTML without serious end-user hacking (Sjoerd has pulled this off somehow, God knows how, but the product doesn’t support it out of the box). It was only last year that he was pulled (kicking and screaming) into providing CSS themes. His own home page is 100K of spacer gifs and nested table markup, and is so invalid that the HTML validator simply gives up in desperation.
Oh, but announce a new but invalid RSS feed, and he’s all over that like Napalm on a fresh wound.
So standards obviously matter to him, but only when he’s the one locking the trunk.
— Mark
HAHAHAHAAHA. I wish there was a way to verify that he really wrote this:
“And look at all the self-righteous idiots making proclamations here about this and that, as if anyone who mattered was paying attention. What pathetic mindless idiots you all are. Don’t you get it. The Internet won’t make you rich, or famous, or happy. CSS isn’t a cause. You can’t beat Microsoft. It doesn’t matter. If you want someone to blame, blame your mommy for giving birth to you. Life sucks doesn’t it.”
Posted by Dave Winer at 18:52
— Anonymous
Winer extols some standards (RSS, OPML, and XML-RPC—all ones that he created or has significant investment in) while eschewing others (HTML, CSS, RDF, SOAP—all ones he doesn’t understand or feels snubbed by).
Making it up as you go along, eh Mark?
I love all the ones you say I “eschew” except for RDF which I think is a waste of time.
I use CSS in my HTML, and damn Mark I designed SOAP.
You’re even more dishonest than I thought you were.
Dave,
Focusing in on HTML, it’s been my impression that what you love about it is the ability to create ‘tag soup’ pages that look good in a browser, and that you don’t care at all about whether the HTML is valid or well formed.
In other words, if something *looks* like a headline to a user in a browser, it doesn’t matter to you whether the affect was acheived by bumping up the size and bolding some text in a paragraph, or by using an <h3> tag.
So, I think it would be correct to say that you love and use HTML-the-format (and HTML rendering apps), but you don’t love and use HTML-the-standard.
Have I got that right, or am I off-base here?
Dave, if you’re going to slime people, at least do it on your own site, with your own bandwidth, where absolutely everything is under your own name, as opposed to the drive-by sliming you perpetrated here.
You’re still alive, though, right?
Geez. Attack of the web acronym standards. As silly and amusing as you both sound (”You’re an asshole! CSS! No, *you’re* the asshole! RSS!), you’re, um, a little more wrong than Mark is, Dave.
“I use CSS in my HTML.” No you don’t. At least not on scripting.com or scriptingnews.userland.com. It’s full of [shudder] FONT and CENTER tags, and produces source code that could be cut in half–or even a third–if you used even the very simplest of CSS (a font: or background: selector).
I’m not a member of the XHTML validation camp either (sorry, Netscape 4’s still out there), but seriously. Try CSS; you’ll like it.
— Graham
I’ve seen a number of comments over various blogs recently that have Dave Winer’s name attached to them. They are all, without exception, the work of a fool.
Is somebody going around pretending to be Dave as a kind of a smear campaign, or is he really this much of an arsehole?
— Anonymous
Without passing judgement on your name-calling, I can verify with near-certainty that the comments are authentic. They are in line with the tone and content of comments he’s previously posted on his own site. And the IP address he’s posting from matches the IP address he has previously used to send email.
I suppose it’s theoretically possible that someone is spoofing all that just so they can go around behaving exactly the way Dave usually behaves, but what would be the point? Dave reads virtually everyone; he would instantly notice, and complain loudly (and rightly so), if someone were making a serious effort to steal his identity.
Then again, some people still believe OJ didn’t do it. (Bill Maher: “There’s blood at the scene, there’s blood in his car… this is like a 2-minute Colombo episode.”)
— Mark
Mark, I think your anonymous commentator has hit a bit of serendipity, if I’m using that word correctly. I also had a huge laugh when reading it.
It baffles me that people can both discount Winer as a ranting fool, and then get all worked up when he spouts off. Move on, people. He’s not worth the effort.
— Michael
I’m not deep into the Weblogging scene myself right now; I’m just another bozo with a log, but I know Mark personally. I worked with him for just over a year. When I finally got my weblog going one of my first thoughts was to tip my hat to him based on something I read right after I started my own site (I won’t be too self serving, I’ll make you go to my site and find it ;)).
I respect Mark tremendously, and his comments make sense and can be backed up. I don’t know this Dave Winer very well and I know nothing about CSS (I like Mark’s nontechnical posts myself).
I will say this. If Mark is lying, then getting one of Dave Winer’s software packages checking on the validity of the HTML would determine the validity of Mark’s comments (pun intended).
Dave, however, seems to rely on slandering Mark. Is your CSS on your website standardized or is a mess? Are the designs for SOAP something that have since been altered from your original design and now do the users of SOAP avoid your own standards and use their own? If you wish to dispute Mark’s claims, we only allow logic and fact on this site, not slander.
— Adrian