—This is the house [dive into mark]

It’s notable that in the wake of the Death of XHTML, some number of people are pointing fingers toward Jeffrey Zeldman, the writer, web standards educator and evangelist who, with his book ‘Designing for Web Standards’, provided the spark that pushed ‘XHTML’ as ‘new HTML’.

This seems harsh.

Zeldman, in writing that book, made a call based on best available knowledge that XHTML was the future. At the time, it looked that way. Turned out not to be. But as all pragmatists know, whether you use XHTML or HTML4 makes not the blindest difference. Never has. So, it doesn’t matter that someone made the wrong prediction about the future.

I don’t mean indifference in a smug ‘it’s all parsed as HTML really’ way, I just mean that in reality, bar a /> here and there, it’s really the same language.

What Zeldman and those that followed him achieved by evangelising XHTML over HTML4 has different value; a clear distinction between old, broken coding practices and the clean, accessible CSS-driven present. Yes, all that they preached could be achieved exactly the same by using HTML4 properly, but that’s not the point; people weren’t using HTML4 properly.

Some refer to this choice to evangelise XHTML as a ‘marketing tool’, an expression that seems intended to accusatively finger the book authors and conference speakers that stood up for XHTML at that time.

I instead refer to it as an ‘education tool’. This was about teaching, not branding.

I firmly believe that people responded to the Web Standards movement with more enthusiasm and positivity because of XHTML. They came to it learning and teaching something new and better, not being taught that everyone was just doing it wrong.

Did XHTML get pushed in too absolute terms? Yes. Did properly-written HTML4 get libelled as ‘tag soup’? Yes. Would it be better if that hadn’t happened? Sure.

But would ‘Write better HTML’ have had anything like the educational impact of ‘Learn new XHTML’? Not a chance. Would coding standards, accessibility and the spread of structured data on the web be as successful as they are today without the XHTML education? I say no.

So HTML5 is the real deal, but authors can continue setting their own coding standards on syntax and well-formedness. If you advocate XHTML as taught by Zeldman et al, then those can be your HTML5 coding standards, too.

The ‘house that Jeffrey built’ is one of concrete foundations, and it taught everyone in the community how to build houses. So what if we’re re-pointing the bricks?

US man sets hot dog-eating record (BBC News).

I honestly wasn’t sure which absurd paragraph of this article to quote. There were many contenders.

Happy Forth July, American friends.

— Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about the future of XHTML

HTML won.

Caroline McCarthy

Question to all: What is it with San Francisco’s reputation concerning pizza?

Is it because I only ever eat from Little Star and Delfina that I’m ignorant to some twisted, dark underbelly of San Francisco, where terrible cheese-lathered bread-product unworthy of the name ‘pizza’ is rubbed against a dog and baked in the warmth of someone’s flatulence? Is there really pizza that bad in this city? Is New York really that good? Am I going to have to fly across the country to find out? Who wants to come? When?

Tangentially, John Gruber posted a nice explanation of how his blog, Daring Fireball is not free to read, as it is ad supported. In this paragraph, he clearly summarises the relationship between all interested parties in the publishing of his content.

This is hugely important, because the same model applies to vast quantities of internet publishing, video and music. One of the bigger challenges modern consumption culture has to overcome is a broken perception of ‘free’. The mistaken belief that everything on the internet is free is distorting people’s judgement of value, and skewing their expectations (and demands) of services.

For example: Netflix is clearly not free because you pay them a monthly subscription to watch their streaming video. But though Hulu allows you to go to their website and just hit play, it’s not free either. The programming that Hulu distributes has not been given away, nor is it worthless. You’re just paying for it differently.

Source: Daring Fireball Linked List: Seth Godin Says Malcolm Gladwell Is Wrong

Google have published PHP performance guidelines, in addition to their HTML/CSS/JavaScript page speed guidelines. Similarly though, they are full of errors, contradictions and unsubstantiated claims, resulting in the PHP development team itself responding to them.

PHP optimisation is certainly not my forte, but this quote from Troels Knack-Neilsen at SitePoint gets to the core of universal performance optimisation advice. Documentation of this enhancements is always, tragically, written in an all-or-nothing, absolute sense. It disregards more pragmatic, less easily measurable qualities in application development like code legibility, future maintenance, even security.

So many performance optimisations are technically, measurably ‘correct’ by miniscule margins, and are provide simply irrelevant gains in the real world, at much greater cost to other aspects of your code.

SitePoint A Note on Google’s So-called Best Practices, via Christian Heilmann

I find it especially interesting that a mere two years after shipping, “Apple” is the big-name manufacturer and everyone else is just “others”.

The news itself is excellent, too: mobile phones standardising on micro-USB for charging means we can kiss proprietary chargers farewell next year.

CNET News via Dave Morin

BBC NEWS Windows 7 pricing gets unveiled

The Windows 7/Internet Explorer unbundling malarky is an utterly confusing tangle.

What seems to be happening here is that Microsoft, having been ordered not to ship IE with Windows in Europe, are denying customers a smooth upgrade path (which would, apparently, entail removing IE from the user’s system, and then asking them which browser they wanted to use. Or something like that.) I think this is a tactical move to irritate people. Bear in mind that Internet Explorer is not absent in Windows 7 at all; the Trident engine and JScript libraries are shared components of Windows (just as WebKit is on Mac OSX) and are used by all number of first and third party applications. At most, all that’s removed, or hidden, is the Internet Explorer executable.

The self-install consumers are a bit of a distraction though. They make up a tiny, miniscule subset of the number of people obtaining Windows 7. For most users, they don’t get Windows 7 from Microsoft; Microsoft provide new copies of Windows to OEMs, and Windows reaches the consumer preloaded on some new hardware. The OEMs are supposed to choose which browser to put on the system by default. They will, I’m certain, all choose to install Internet Explorer.

This ‘default browser’ thing is one area where the PC sales market is a complicated mess, and where a comparison with Apple actually kind-of works:

Consider all computer hardware manufacturers as equals for a moment: Apple, Dell, HP and Gateway are all in direct competition, at least from the perspective of Dell, HP and Gateway.

Apple differentiates itself in the personal computer market in a number of ways, but one of the important ways is in the curation of the user experience.

In simple comparison, the functionality of the software bundled with a Mac maps to that of a Windows PC: There’s an operating system, a mail client, a web browser, a photo manager, a music player. Every Windows PC ships with these tools, too. Apple, as a computer manufacturer, ships a different set of software from other computers. That they build the software themselves themselves is not so relevant here, the point is that they select software to ship with their computers for the purpose of providing their users a better user experience.

Compare to Dell. At the root, their motivation should be the same as Apple: Ship the best possible user experience to their users, so that customers value ‘buying a Dell’.

But, they don’t. They ship the same software over and over because they dare not impose change on their users. They have been shipping what Microsoft provides them in the Windows bundle for a generation, and have never exerted control over the experience of ‘using a Dell’ over ‘using a Compaq’ or ‘using a Gateway’.

In the PC world, the manufactures are incredibly weak, and they’ve cemented their weakness.

Shipping alternate browsers doesn’t require a piece of European Union legislation, it requires a manufacture to take control of the user experience of their machine and curate the software they ship. They could have installed Firefox or Opera on their Windows images and set it as the default. They could have advertised “tabbed web pages” and “virus free browsing” as features of buying their machine. They didn’t.

In the past, I’ve understood that Microsoft offered financial incentive to manufacturers to favour IE and Windows Media Player in their distributions, or even inconvenienced licensing to those who wanted to ship alternates. That’s certainly anti-competitive and if not already illegal, seems like a more useful focus of legislation.

The core problem remains though, that the manufacturers do not curate. They bundle software through partnerships and are paid to include time-limited trials of substandard and often duplicitous applications. Dell charge their customers to not have that software included.

The culture of PC manufacture is not going to embrace this chance to ship Firefox, or Opera, or Safari. If they wanted to curate the experience they would already do it.

Instead, they’re going to do what’s easiest and cheapest. That means they’re going to take their fresh, Internet Explorer-less Windows image, install IE8 on it, and ship that to their customers. Because their customers know Internet Explorer, and shipping what they know will result in less support calls for assistance with web browsing.

This is why the user experience of the PC is so appalling: An entire industry of manufacturers offloaded their complete user-experience to the third-party provider of their operating system. Now they’re at a point where that provider, Microsoft, is misfiring and producing poor software. The manufacturers don’t know how to improve the user experience to their customers, let alone be in a position implement and support it. There’s a lot more to providing a great computing experience than swapping the ‘Blue E’ for a ‘Red O’.