I’ve been talking regularly about the importance of HTML/XHTML validation in Web pages and blogs.
Well, now, there’s a new reason… or, actually, it’s a pretty old one. Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act makes a few requirements for public Web sites and blogs, to improve accessibility for their users.
This page exists to help people on the KDE and GNOME usability lists, which continually attempt to revive old and archived debates about user levels, to understand why this topic is unwelcome.
Since, it seems, netiquette is unfashionable nowadays, and people have forgotten the simple practice of reading the mailing list archives before posting, this page is in order to clarify this particular “user levels” issue.
So, for:
And, without further ado, here’s why.
ChipLog » Blog Archive » Taggable Desktop says they’re not planning on implementing tags as Extended Attributes.
I still disagree. I think the library should implement both a database for the user, and also write the tags out to extended attributes whenever possible.
But they told me no, it ain’t gonna happen this way
and here are the reasons, together with my rebuttals:
Hold on a sec folks!
I really don’t understand why we are trying to build a taxonomy of container classes. There are some languages which have rather elaborate taxonomys of container classes. The STL comes to mind, Smalltalk (I think), even Java’s collection classes are somewhat elaborate. But this is NOT how things have been done in the Python world. We believe that flat is better than nested. We believe in one simple-and-obvious way to do things. For goodness sakes, we don’t even have a basic linked-list type because we figure it’s simpler to make people just use the single well-tuned array-list implementation.
Yes, indeed. I couldn’t agree more.
thTeong WebLog|Blog About Everything asks whether validation is important.
Here’s my take on the issue: it’s very important.
If your content does not validate, your RSS feeds might be broken as well. Most feed readers will barf when fed broken XML/XHTML. That means fewer readers.
Validation is also important in another sense: when you focus on validation, you inevitably end up doing somethign about semantics in your markup. Everyone benefits from this, especially you, the author, because Google and other search engines benefit from semantic markup.
Plus, broken HTML/XHTML may render in unpredictable ways with different browsers. XHTML-based blogs may not even render under certain circumstances (we’re talking about the famous application/xml+html content type here). I don’t suppose you’d want to harm your readers’ reading experiences, do you?
To help you in your thankless task of ensuring that your WordPress blog always remains valid HTML/XHTML, I’ve written a special plug-in for it: the WordPress XHTML validator. Download it today!
By the way, thanks for the reference link, thTeong!
…is pretty much over. Plone is more standards-compliant, according to my little unscientific benchmark.
Actually, this “benchmark” proves nothing.
Or does it? This quick test shows, at the least, that the Plone developers are more committed to standards than the Joomla! guys. It might be that the underlying technologies are strong enablers in this department (I truly believe this to be the case, having developed both in Python and in PHP). It might be that the Plone developers are more diligent. It might be a combination of both.
Go Plone!
Update: Mambo doesn’t fare well either. 10 validation errors.
I frequently hear complaints about CIOs in other companies. Complaints directed straight at Microsoft Windows. I’ve seen people go blue in the face when complaining about the assorted kinds of malware they’ve had to remove from the networks they manage.
But the mere suggestion of migrating to Linux, directed at those CIOs, is enough to trigger a bunch of emotional responses on them. “Our users won’t go along”, “We depend too much on Office to make the switch”, “Linux costs more in the end” are common responses.
Today, I’ll be telling the story of our own migration to Linux. As you can probably infer from the title of this story, it’s been a success.
En este artículo de Andrés Robalino, una pila de libros de Java hacen su aparición, en foto. Daría la impresión de que, según Andrés, así se reconoce a un buen programador. Por fortuna, tiene un enlace a un artículo sobre Ruby. Andrés, ponte pilas y saca esa foto de libros de Java. (more…)
OK, so the Cold War is over. Mutually assured destruction is no longer a big concern. People are now living longer and enjoying better, more fulfilling lives. What in the entire world could possibly warrant such an alarming title for an article?
Software.
Yes. The world of software is under heavy attack, from three distinct fronts. But let’s not get carried away — we’ll get to the three fronts soon.