log

It takes only a brief skim through the com­ments on Zeld­man’s XHTML2 death post to realise just how many peo­ple have absolute­ly no idea what’s been going on in their indus­try for years. Or why they even start­ed cod­ing to a par­tic­u­lar stan­dard in the first place. Or why they con­tin­ue to do so.

Prag­ma­tism be damned it seems; bet­ter to act Chick­en Lit­tle and bemoan the death of some­thing they’ll nev­er use whilst par­rot­ing inac­cu­rate FUD about HTML5 than to do a bloody Google search and read the first line of the first result. XHTML con­tin­ues on in HTML5’s XML seri­al­i­sa­tion (skip to Doc­u­ment Rep­re­sen­ta­tion), with all the fea­ture ben­e­fits of the ‘clas­sic’ seri­al­i­sa­tion that appar­ent­ly caus­es the imme­di­ate heat-death of the uni­verse if used.

You’re free to keep using XHTML and include what­ev­er tal­is­mans make you sleep well at night. Copy/paste every shred of meta­da­ta markup you can find that reg­u­lar surfers won’t see and search engines will large­ly ignore. Exces­sive use of the lat­est W3C XML spec for mark­ing up indi­vid­ual char­ac­ters will ensure your page is absolute­ly per­fect. Meanwhile…

What did we actu­al­ly gain from XHTML?

Chris­t­ian Bale returns as Bat­man in the tech­ni­cal­ly stun­ning and facepalm­ing­ly bad­ly exe­cut­ed Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion. Wit­ness all intel­lec­tu­al aspi­ra­tions of the Ter­mi­na­tor uni­verse reduced to large-scale pyrotech­nics as the writ­ing team strug­gle to hold the audi­ence’s atten­tion in a movie with almost no endear­ing char­ac­ters. Relive the excite­ment of hav­ing the obvi­ous spelled out when woe­ful­ly cast Hele­na Bon­ham Carter resumes her role as the Archi­tect from The Matrix Reloaded. You’ll def­i­nite­ly be lean­ing back with crossed arms in antic­i­pa­tion of the next mis­placed one-lin­er from Ter­mi­na­tor 2!

Bonus points go to the writer who made the last line from the only mem­o­rable char­ac­ter a ham­my pun about the human heart. Addi­tion­al bonus points go to the writer who removed said mem­o­rable char­ac­ter thir­ty sec­onds before close, thus reset­ting the Ter­mi­na­tor uni­verse to almost exact­ly the same state it was in at the begin­ning of the film. Sequels ahoy!

What I liked: Excel­lent heli­copter crash intro sequence, Con­ver­sa­tions with Sarah Con­nor, John/Marcus con­fronta­tion, Mar­cus inter­fac­ing with Skynet (although, again, does his gen­e­sis real­ly need spelling out?). Marcus.

The King and the Toast­er. Which tech­nol­o­gy the pro­gram­mer rep­re­sents is left as an exer­cise for the reader.

Just searched Google for “the only way”, a song by Gotye. Strange­ly, almost almost every result was reli­gious in nature, includ­ing this gem:

Is it rea­son­able to believe that Jesus is the only way to the only God, and that the oth­er 9999 reli­gions are false? What’s a Chris­t­ian to think?

I’m remind­ed of Frank Her­bert’s Heretics of Dune: In one sen­tence, the powin­dah invoked infin­i­ty and denied it, nev­er once observ­ing their own foolishness.

How long will we be stuck with trib­al­is­tic rit­u­al? Excuse me while I won­der at the sin­cer­i­ty of one reli­gious par­ty with a his­to­ry of intol­er­ance cavort­ing with anoth­er reli­gious par­ty with a his­to­ry of intol­er­ance when the prime func­tion of both is con­vert­ing each oth­er’s wor­ship­per stockpile.

What a bizarre world we live in when reli­gions fawn over each oth­er. It’s like com­par­ing ant farms. I wish we’d go back to wor­ship­ping the sun.

From Rob Weir’s ODF Inter­op­er­abil­i­ty post:

Remem­ber, it is not par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult or clever to to take an adverse read­ing of a stan­dard to make an incom­pat­i­ble, non-inter­op­er­a­ble prod­uct. Take HTML, for exam­ple. It does not define the attrib­ut­es of unstyled (default) text. So I could cre­ate a per­fect­ly con­for­mant brows­er imple­men­ta­tion that makes all default text be 4‑point Zapf Ding­bats, white text on a white back­ground. It would con­form with the stan­dard, but it would be per­fect­ly unus­able by anyone.