Very nice. Now where’s that rat with my cheese?
This entry, though obviously useful to its author, would be much more useful to its readers with a hint of context. Are you referring to Mr. Zeldman and XHTML?
— Dan Davies Brackett 
Qué?
— confused
Was wondering how long before I’d see a classic Mark Pilgrim post about the XHTML2/HTML5 fuss. Thanks for ending the day on a high note for me.
Brilliant.
Good riddance to XHTML
Microsoft’s refusal to support parsing it as XML was the one of the best things they ever did for the web, up there with XHR and beating NN4 on merit.
— Fred
Hilarious. Well done.
Finally, an item in my Google Reader feeds that I can tag both ’standards’ and ‘poetry.’
— sethaurus
This is both delicious and nutritious. Bravo, sir.
WTF is Jeffrey?
— pfix
We all owe Jeffrey and “The Web Standards (except HTML4.01) Project” a debt of gratitude. Without their sterling efforts, we’d all still be wondering whether most web designers are too stupid to use XHTML.
— mattur
rather stupid, if u ask me
— pietro
You are conflating a perfectly good syntax (XHTML 1, XHTML 5) with a dead spec (XHTML 2) for a cheap laugh at someone else’s expense.
Golf. Clap.
I was just thinking it might be nice if you followed up the “video encoding” series with an article about the current state of the art in HTML5 politics. This was better than I could have possibly imagined.
— Josh
So now that XHTML is passé, and since HTML5 won’t be ready until 2052, I’m going back to HTML 4.01. Did you know SGML DTDs can use a shortcut to close tags by using a slash and *not a greater-than*, i.e., `<br/`? (That was not a typo.) And did you know that HTML 4.01 Strict DTD employs said shortcut? So “ in HTML4 has an extra `>` and is therefore *wrong*, even though no browser actually implements that syntax (don’t believe me? go try the validator!). In other words, goodbye slashes. It was good to know you.
Is this thing using Markdown? In the last comment I meant « “<br />” in HTML4 has an extra ‘>’ » …
Mark, in my book, you just lost a huge measure of respect.
— Patrick J. Anderson
You are a very small child in the world of men. And nobody will change your diaper. Rot in hell.
— Jeffrey
Oh and by the way, Google Chrome sucks donkey balls.
— Jeffrey
This was needlessly personal, Mark.
I have never seen a bunch of people get so worked up about a _joke_ regarding MARKUP.
Nerd rage makes me laugh
— Izzit
A joke parodying the format of traditional children’s song «This is the house that Jack built»: not needlessly personal.
«You use diapers, rot in hell»: needlessly personal.
Nerd rage: makes me weep.
Each time this happens: I am more and more convinced that blog comments should be considered harmful and disabled everywhere in favor of trackback-based discussions.
You’re an ass.
— Erik
I’m reminded of another context in which the battle quickly grew vicious, because the stakes were so low. I’m particularly impressed at how nobody’s bothered to put forth much of an argument either way.
Pathetic.
— Spike
I agree. Blogs are useless when not monitored, but until that day arrives, idiots who post blogs like this will suffer harsh criticism. So Mark, you’re a dweeb.
— Jeffrey
I’ve never flamed or trolled before, but I can safely say that if I knew how to do it, I would be a large, stone-based creature in the infernal depths of a cave (with broadband on fire-retardent co-ax) typing a comment to this post and that comment would be more flame-y and troll-y than it is possible to imagine. So just take it on faith (you can trust me, you’ve gOt IP for feck’s sake) that you would be sufficiently cowed that you would apologize to Jeffrey for causing or possibly causing offense to one who has done more for the web than, I suspect, you will ever do.
— Alan
I’ve been buying the ‘xhtml is pointless’ argument for some time now. But I do think that Zeldman’s work in inspiring a more code-conscious attitude among developers through the standards movement has been a big net win for producers and consumers of web content. So this seems a little harsh.
Then again, everything has its context, and within the context of actually trying to define and propagate new standards, the misinformation around XHTML that has come out of his movement is open to real criticism, I suppose. And this was fun. Your overall tone suggests thick skin, so I guess you don’t mind the blog karma. I enjoy your writing.
Really, I’m just glad that I can come here at work now and not have to worry about big bold “fuck the foundries” on my screen.
— Jonathan Gala
“A joke parodying the format of traditional children’s song «This is the house that Jack built»: not needlessly personal.”
Oh, except the part where he named Zeldman (sorry, “Jeffrey”) in every stanza. Come on. If one dishes it out, one is expected to take it.
— KT
What some observers may fail to account for is that Jeffrey is the person who made markup *relevant* to the world at large. Markup, HTML, and the W3C itself. And Hixie, you Marc, and most of us commenting here. As confused as he may or may not be, he deserves some respect. I’m not sure how this post helps clarifying the overall confusion.
— manuel
@KT: Emphasis on «joke». If I was Jeffrey I wouldn’t be offended at all. My friends joke about stuff I do all the time, and whether it’s deserving or not, no one cares. That’s what humor is supposed to be for. I truly don’t get what all the rage is about. It’s, in my opinion, the kind of exaggerated reaction that people only allow themselves to indulge in the net, without the social effects of human interaction and body language, where you can flame other people and not feel guilty. Every time this happens, I get more depressed about what the future of communication is — i.e. one where people aren’t allowed to joke without being metaphorically stoned.
Zeldman could have taken this opportunity to say, “Good news! After many years in the wilderness, the W3C has finally heard the concerns that I and others have been voicing about the needs of real web developers and designers. They have pulled the plug on the fantasy called ‘XHTML 2′ that wasn’t backwardly compatible with the markup you’ve been writing for the past 10 years, wasn’t being implemented by any major browsers, and would have required a whole new world of pain known as ‘draconian error handling.’ And don’t worry, you can still close your tags and quote your attributes and validate your pages as HTML 5, if that’s the coding style you’re comfortable with.”
Zeldman could have taken this opportunity to say, “Good news! HTML 5 have taken a lot of important but undocumented underpinnings of the web platform — essentials like document.write, XMLHttpRequest, even the Window object — reverse-engineered all the major browsers (especially Internet Explorer), and documented how they actually work. Browser vendors are already fixing some of their parsing quirks, filling in gaps in their implementations of previously undocumented/underdocumented features, and converging on more interoperable behavior. You won’t see the results overnight, but these are important steps towards making the web a less frustrating development platform.”
Zeldman could have taken this opportunity to say, “And hey, it’s not just about documenting the old crap. The standards-based web is gaining new features at a faster rate than any time in history. Things like video, audio, canvas, threaded Javascript, offline functionality, and other stuff that many of you have been asking for for over a decade… they’re coming, and some of them are already here. I’ll be using my many platforms — here on my blog, on ‘A List Apart’, and in future books — to explain to all of you how you can build next-generation web sites based on web standards.”
But he didn’t. He said, “WTF happened to the ‘X’?” and proceeded to play the faux populist and martyr.
— Mark
Maybe that’s what you should have posted, Mark.
— Spike
Hey, pretty good. i like
— Nick
Who cares what standard this follows, for a tech poem it’s bloody awesome.
and gives me an idea…
— Bill
> He said, “WTF happened to the ‘X’?” and proceeded to play the faux > populist and martyr
Are you referring to the post title “XHTML DOA WTF”? It’s it obvious from the opening paragraph and the his comments that this was meant ironically?
— Anonymous
No, Zeldman did not say “WTF happened to the ‘X’?”. The headline to his post reporting the news of the end of XHTML 2 was “XHTML DOA WTF”, which I imagine is kind of a joke you’re choosing not to get. He really offered no further comment than just reporting the news, besides acknowledging that it would provoke some debate. Just to be clear, so you might understand, the WTF bit is, most likely, a reference to the confusion caused by the demise of XHTML 2, given that web standards evangelists have been saying for ten years that XHTML was the future. That’s all. But you knew that, you just went for a cheap shot that doesn’t make sense, and makes you look much smaller than you are.
— Justin Connolly
“Maybe that’s what you should have posted, Mark.”
Indeed. But it’s not really a surprise that he didn’t.
No, the “faux populist and martyr” is a reference to this quote from Zeldman’s followup post: “there are just as many people who worry that a specification of which they don’t entirely approve is being shoved down their throats by an uncaring elite.” Puuuuuuhleeeeeeeeze. (And never mind his perpetuating the zombie lies about “2022″ and “a toddler specification.” It’s been actively developed for over 5 years, and browsers are already shipping support for large parts of it. Frankly, I’d think twice about hiring a designer who’s so wrapped up in his own little world that he doesn’t even know about the major new features in Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5.)
@Eric: boy, I thought Henri’s bit about “something newer and shinier” was a little harsh, but it turns out he really nailed it. The minute it became clear that XHTML was no longer the newest and shiniest, you people just went right off the rails.
Here’s the thing: XHTML 1 was a stepping stone to nowhere. You people found a nice little loophole where you could claim you were using the latest and greatest (without having to deal with all that icky draconian error handling), and you milked it for all it was worth. But XHTML 1 was always a deadend; there was never any future there. It had to end sometime. You did know that, right?
— Mark
What the hell are you talking about, Mark? Seriously. Because at a minimum, the following terms need some clarification for me: “you people” and “right off the rails”. Which people, and what rails?
And please, by all means, point out to me where I milked XHTML for anything at all. Because as I recall, I said more than once that I didn’t care what language people used as long as they used it correctly; that I personally preferred HTML to XHTML; and that my blog was all HTML4 for a while and then became a mixture of XHTML and HTML, depending on what was generating or had generated the page. Like here, for example. Or here. Or here.
Then again, none of that means I think that people who pushed for and promoted XHTML were wrong to do so, or that they were milking anything. I think– actually, I know– they did so for the best of reasons, in good faith, in an attempt to promote the best authoring practices they knew in order to build the best web they could. No exploits, no hunting for loopholes, no ill intent. No malice at all, despite what some will claim.
Someone’s going off the rails, all right, but I don’t think it’s who you think it is. What I still fail to understand is why.
I don’t get what you’re so upset about. Zeldman promoted a markup language that was useful and worked. It’s allowed me to build hundreds of sites over the past five or so years that look consistent across browsers and are easy to maintain. Sorry if it wasn’t what you would have used, or if some extra slashes took up any of your internet. Maybe people like me aren’t really the target of your ire, since I don’t really care what I’m using over the next five years as long as it continues to look consistent across browsers and is easy to maintain.
— shane
I really don’t want to get involved in all this name-calling, but I do think this poem was really funny and not at all personal. After all, Mr. Zeldman and Mr. Meyer did extoll all web designers to use XHTML for development at http://www.alistapart.com – not that there is anything wrong with that.
— Divya
Quite an effort to put in to undermining every contribution you’ve ever attempted to make to this great conversation. Or did you think that a post which could be summarized “Nyah nyah, I told you so,” was going to have everyone mousing to the “subscribe” button?
“Mark, in my book, you just lost a huge measure of respect.” — Patrick J. Anderson
^ What he said. You’re an ass.
— Litso
I didn’t realize XHTML2 had died a well-deserved death when I first read this ditty yesterday. The intellectual masturbation is a predictable result of all standards efforts that try to invent new technology as opposed to codifying and standardizing existing practice (ISO/OSI anyone?). Design by committee leads nowhere, and standards committees are worse than most. I am worried that HTML5 will follow the same path with everyone and their grandmother clamoring for their pet useless feature (e.g. RDFa) to be included. Just witness all the bile directed at Ian Hickson for trying to impose some discipline onto chaos.
Can’t we all just use WPF?
— Matt
It’s not what you say it’s how you say it. Mark, you just made yourself look childish and mean spirited.
— RayMcK
@Matt VRML! VRML! VRML!
— Spike
Perhaps next post could be a parody of the song “My Own Worst Enemy”.
Whoa. The guy who complained about something being “shoved down their throats by an uncaring elite” is part of the draconian error handling cabal? The irony’s a bit thick there, isn’t it?
@KT: Emphasis on «joke». If I was Jeffrey I wouldn’t be offended at all. My friends joke about stuff I do all the time, and whether it’s deserving or not, no one cares. That’s what humor is supposed to be for. I truly don’t get what all the rage is about. It’s, in my opinion, the kind of exaggerated reaction that people only allow themselves to indulge in the net, without the social effects of human interaction and body language, where you can flame other people and not feel guilty. Every time this happens, I get more depressed about what the future of communication is — i.e. one where people aren’t allowed to joke without being metaphorically stoned.
Rage? I was just responding to the comment that this wasn’t needlessly personal, which it is. Now you’re worried about the future of communication for some reason, as well as doing the “It was a JOKE!!!” thing. Can we be done now?
— KT
If it was a joke, it was *very* poorly received.
http://www.zeldman.com/2009/07/07/in-defense-of-web-developers/#comment-44388
Personally, I thought the nursery rhyme was clever. That said, I am scratching my head at the amount of heat and lack of light this discussion is generating.
— smerp
No malice at all, despite what some will claim.
So, we’re going to rewrite history. We’re all supposed to pretend that Zeldman, WaSP &co did not behave – for years – like the XHTML Taliban. Or if they did, it was OK because their hearts were in the right place.
— mattur
Mark you’re better in burning bridges than building ones. Is it because the former is easier that the latter?
— Timotheus
I’ve always had a hard time stomaching the particularly obsequious and docile fans Zeldman seem to attract. After reading some the reactions on here, I remember why they get on my nerves so much…
— Yann
I’m with Zeldman and Jeremy Keith.
I don’t understand why someone would mock XHTML or HTML 5 used with XHTML syntax or XHTML served as text/html.
Nor would I understand why some may pretend that writing HTML 4.01 or HTML 5 (with HTML syntax) can be in any way superior to writing XHTML 1.0 or HTML 5 (with XHTML syntax) or XHTML 5 (served as application/xml+xhtml).
Just my 2 cents…
— Michel
Makes me wanna visit the XML conference to see them attempt to pooh, pooh this to the same degree they unsuccessfully attempted to shout-down keynote speaker & panelist Douglas Crockford as he gave us the skinny on RFC 4627.
Bravo! Why do some people get their panties in such a bunch? I am already sick of hearing about all of this crap.
— Jason
This is the comment
That points out the silliness
Of all the zealots
Who think they know best
— Mike Bucks
“Mark, in my book, you just lost a huge measure of respect.” — Patrick J. Anderson
What he said with knobs on..
Nobody has pointed out the very important fact that the rude remarks signed “Jeffrey” were not – I repeat not – written by Jeffrey Zeldman.
http://www.zeldman.com/2009/07/07/in-defense-of-web-developers/#comment-44524
People. Take a deep breath, check your facts – and perhaps assume a bit more good faith?
Why all the snark and verbal violence flying around in this so-called debate? “XHTML Taliban?” Oh. Please. What exactly is there to debate, anyway? XHTML was a tool a lot of people, myself included, find more suited to their particular needs. In fact there are quite a few things I found more difficult or impossible to do with HTML4 due to its goofy, inconsistent DOM implementation across browsers; in my “real world” what I care about is that XHTML requires me to do less work for the same result for the things that I do, and I like the way the code looks much better. This is something that may not be clear to a designer who only cares about the presentational outcome (and typically does not write the markup anyway, which leads me to wonder why they would care), but as a developer who does a hell of a lot more work with PHP & Javascript than with the markup, XHTML makes a big difference for me. Clearly even the people working on XHTML 2 came do admit that it was not going to be carrying that torch.
Nobody “wins” or “loses” anything when a tentative spec that nobody gives a damn about gets cancelled. As far as I can tell there’s nothing to gloat or pout about here.
— Justen
XHTML was a tool a lot of people, myself included, find more suited to their particular needs. In fact there are quite a few things I found more difficult or impossible to do with HTML4 due to its goofy, inconsistent DOM implementation across browsers
“XHTML” served as text/html is HTML, with exactly the same “goofy, inconsistent DOM implementation across browsers.” The fact that you thought you were getting different behaviour, by serving “XHTML” as text/html is exactly the sort of magical thinking that Mark was complaining about.
Finally, someone putting that pompous cunt in his place. Good work.
— Sven
Mark. Clean your house. Comments like the drooler from “Sven” aren’t helping anyone.
Uh-oh, did I offend your delicate sensibilities, Nick? Get over yourself. You’re like Zeldman only no one knows who you are.
— Sven
Sven, you might have to hit puberty before you’re capable of offending anyone’s sensibilities, delicate or otherwise.
I visited this page to see the comments, of course, but instead was distracted by how ugly firefox renders it with the ‘MgOpen Canonica’ font. It looks much better in Midori, but why not leave it out entirely?
I don’t pretend anything, mattur. What you choose to pretend is up to you.
Very sad to read “diveintomark” and “zeldman” and so many others to fight in pointless war…
Zeldman did a lot of great works to explain the value of a standard web. It helps me to be aware of great tools and to explain concepts to students and co-workers.
Xhtml was very useful, making me possible and easy to use xml processing stuff (in plain english : to use others tools from my engineering work to create web content) , no I was not alone.
Html 5 is not killing xml, so why are you fighting ?
Xhtml 2 is dead, okay, great, I don’t care ! Xml strict syntax is still possible.
-
ie 6,7, 8 whatever are plain wrong to not support xml processing for website. Okay we live in the real world, believe me I’m aware. Nevertheless it was interesting to converge toward one language with strict (but optional) syntax. Believe me, it helps to ease works.
but okay, okay, don’t be angry, we will do html 5, it’s nice, efficient, with exciting features, we understand that.
But please, stop mocking people like Zeldman, he did not tell anything that harsh, did try to explain a better web and succeeds in that in part and you should be happy for that.
-
In fact, all that story is now sickening me. Because of that ‘xhtml 2′ mess (a tempest in a tea cup) , now too much people are mocking others.
Enough ! go get to work ! hTML 5 is far to be all standard and ready in real browsers ! and I NEED reality to make money !
-
the song and joke was nice and funny, true, but I’m disappointed by too much person now.
— oomu
“the needs of real web developers and designers”
That phrase is priceless. I like XHTML problem is we are not that complicated and
neither is our information. XHTML meets a application that most web designers and developers don’t understand. “That’s OK” (Stewart Smally) because the need of our information push is simple. Even if we think our information is smart and complicated. Isn’t a lot of the crap designers want just an advanced Marquee tag? I could go on for a long time…I have to go back to the home now…
If it wasn’t for the independent cry for standards all web developers could be living today with Microsofts Member firmly wedged up their behinds.
Standards are relevant – and XHTML for better or worse is the cleanest of the current stack of standards. Then HTML4 Strict.
Querks mode sucks the bat.
Getting over to standards mode sucks for any developer, but its just like learning to ride a bicycle. Pain, falling over, suffering, but once one is up and away you don’t look back, because its actually faster, more exact and more predictable. Less time debugging = a better living for the humble website developer
— Francis Madden
“If it wasn’t for the independent cry for standards”
We would have to actually educate ourselves as to what well-formed means.
Standards ain’t a big thing well-formed is. Can can we start to call markup semantic and well-formed? Or does it still have the need to be fashionable?
@mark the namespace does work…even in IE. You would be surprised what you can do with mod_rewrite :=)
For those who think they’ve been using XHTML all these years, let me offer the following (valid XHTML 1.0 Strict) document. Question: what colour is the word “red”?
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head><title>XHTML My Ass</title></head>
<body>
<h1>XHTML My Ass</h1>
<div>
<p style=”color:blue”/>
red
<p>black</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Its black and rightly so. What were you trying to do?
— sharan666
Its black and rightly so.
Not when the page is served as text/html, it isn’t.