You could say I had about 15 minutes of limited web standard fame in some parts of Sweden - up until about the time life started craving all of my attention and I found that the words stopped coming when I sat down to blog. This was about three years ago, and I eventually quit bloging alltogether and tried to leverage what little link value I had accumulated and point it in the direction of this site instead.
For a while there I had the number one spot on Google for the keyword "XHTML" if you restricted your search to "Sites in Swedish" or "Sites from Sweden"...
... but this is not a lament about "the good old days" or some tale of remorse over a time long gone - quite the contrary...
... these thoughts are about doing what you can to avoid "information rot".
This is an entirely different story :)
]]> If a tree fell in the forrest...
You see - I noticed today that the same *very* old Swedish page about XHTML that once pissed me off enough to start my initial blogging efforts (my God - it's almost eight years ago now) by being hopelessly out of date, is still in the top three on Google if you search for that keyword!
So if someone in Sweden would wake up from a ten year old coma or something (yeah right - I know, but bare with me) and get the urge of learning about something called "XHTML" from the Internet, a page that still happily states that "there will never be an HTML 5 - XHTML 1 will be replacing HTML 4" will show up in the top three on Google... *shudders*.
Now to me, that's not really a huge problem. Like most of us, I've learned over the years to filter information and look for multiple sources before deciding what's relevant.
But it made me think about my own "archive" of mostly more than five year old "gems" that were very relevant (to me at least) back in the day, but that hardly would stand up against modern day scrutiny - so Instead of simply shuddering and become amazed that information so old it has become inaccurate with a capital I can *still* rank in the top three resulting links on Google...
... shouldn't I turn the scrutiny around and look upon my old dust-gathering pieces of aging information that no longer reflects modern day practices and certainly leaves a lot unsaid about what's good practice nowadays simply because I haven't updated the texts in several years ?
... I removed my archives, what is the likelyhood that me doing so actually helps the author of the very ancient information I mentioned earlier to take the decision to forfeit some adwords-income "for the greater good" of helping accurate information be more easily found on the web by taking down the outdated material?
Slim - probably none :)
But still...
Perhaps it's time for me to consider an act of "information rot prevention" and simply remove the vaning archives and start afresh because my old "blog" was more of a zeitgeist and a platform I used to evangelize standards in my own humble way than the eternal golden piece of knowledge i envisioned back then....
Perhaps it's time to for me to simply add the oldest parts of the archives to the "disallow" parts of my robots.txt - or to tell my blogging engine to start adding a "meta robots noindex" on everything older than a year or two to achieve a good enough balance between my ego ("I once had a popular blog") and my craving for an Internet filled with only relevant links...
Perhaps.
... and perhaps I'm not the only one that *should* start doing this...
Perhaps...
... think about it! :)
How old *is* too old on the Internet?
]]>Happy 10th birthday XHTML 1.0 !
But in the light of HTML5, what's next for XHTML 1.0 ? Oblivion?
Not nescessarily if you ask me :)
But let's start at the beginning...
]]> To me XHTML will always be "the standard that fixed things".I never could get comfortable with the habits of HTML4-parsers to insert elements I hadn't written in the source code into "my" DOM by themselves, and don't get me started over the pains of reading student markup while trying to figure out if this missing end-tag had been omitted deliberately, or by accident (although it was a bit amusing to see eg. the concept that <P> actually was'nt a "double <BR> tag" but the start tag of a paragraph element finally sink in in a student)
XHTML made markup so much easier to teach, and so much easier to handle programatically than the "tag soup" of badly formed HTML4.
Now, the fact that there were three variations of XHTML 1.0 still was a bit of a nuiscance of course - not to mention that the "YSOD" ("Yellow Screen Of Death") - the error page that was shown as a result of an XML syntax error in an XHTML page - made "proper handling" of XHTML pretty darned difficult in practice at times (I never could get myself to enjoy being exposed to the perils of serving XHTML properly - but that's another story).
Nevertheless!
For a few years I actually served valid and well formed XHTML to my visitors regardless of whether their browser needed it served as "text/html" or if it could handle XHTML "properly" served as "application/xhtml+xml" - and it was good.
For me.
My visitors - of course - seldom or never knew the difference, but that's also another story. :)
This practice of adapting the MIME-type would nowadays probably be labeled as "serving polyglot XHTML" - but back in the day I didn't worry about future buzzwords, I just viewed it as a convenient practice in anticipation of the next level of XHTML - and it simply worked (even in MSIE).
Alas.
Today XHTML2 is but a memory (thank God!) and the raging battles over "HTML5"/"WHATWG HTML"/"HTML without a version number"/"Next HTML"/Whateveryoucallitthisweek has taken over the markup spotlight, so it is (perhaps) easily forgotten that XHTML 1 is still a very much viable option for new markup projects - at least it's easilly forgotten if you listen too much to the loudest HTML5 evangelists.
But it is still there - and XHTML 1.0 is IMHO still very much alive and kicking after the first ten years, and it will most likely be around for many a year to come.
Why? - you ask - don't you believe that HTML5 will sweep the floor of all previous competition?
Well I sort of got me an epiphany earlier today when it dawned on me that solid XHTML 1.0 compliance is actually being advertised to developers as one of the (many) interesting features of the upcoming Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 (that is currently in Beta).
Not HTML5 - but valid XHTML 1.0.
... In one of the most selling Microsoft products of all times...
Regardless of your opinion about Microsoft - that to me, if nothing else, is a sign that XHTML 1.0 is still a mature alternative to the bleeding edge of HTML5.
... and that is pretty much the best "birthday present" for XHTML 1.0 that I can think of.
So happy 10th birthday XHTML 1.0. May you live and prosper for many a year to come and perhaps even evolve into a modular, extensible alternative to the monolithic closedness of HTML5.
You were considered elegant by many once - and you still are very much elegant to me.
Cheers! :)
]]>This blog is an attempt to create a new channel where I can write down my thoughts, describe my experiments in the web standards realm and sometimes just try to write something for the hell of it - i.e. a place where I can do pretty much what I like without any other purpose than to have fun, be creative and occasionally perhaps even step back up on my old soapbox and make my personal opinions heard.
Thanks to Anton and the rest of the crew involved in Project 52 for helping me relight this fire.
I'm sure it will be an interesting experience for me and I hope it might interest those of you out there who used to follow my scribblings in Swedish back in the day and still haven't canceled your RSS subscriptions :)
Anyhow...
Regardless of how you've found these notes, you're welcome to this site dear visitor !
Here we go!
To infinity and beyond!
Enjoy (I know I will) !
/Jarvklo