Re: Promotion of XHTML

Alex Rousskov wrote:

>On Mon, 30 Dec 2002, fstorr wrote:
>  
>
>>It really irritates me.  I get called a geek by my intranet manager
>>at work - this coming from the man who won't use CSS and uses
>>FrontPage for "ease".
>>    
>>
>To make any progress, we have to at least identify the primary
>obstacle:
>
>Are you irritated by the fact that FrontPage is easier to use (for
>most humans) than writing raw markup? Are you irritated by the fact
>that Microsoft owns FrontPage? Are you irritated by the fact that
>other WYSIWYG tools are not as popular/known as FrontPage? Are you
>irritated by CSS properties that make writing raw CSS/HTML markup
>difficult and generated markup ugly? Are you irritated by browsers
>that tolerate invalid markup? Other?
>
>In other words, what should be the first priority: changing human
>nature, changing Microsoft, changing W3C marketing, changing CSS/HTML,
>or changing browsers?
>
The problems lie in human nature and a little with Microsoft, but 
Microsoft certainly is not at fault.  They are simply making a product 
that their customers want so the problem lies more in human nature.  
People think that "coding" is a geek thing.  The mission is to change 
that, especially for markup languages such as HTML/XHTML where you are 
telling what you mean or CSS where you tell what you want it to look 
like.  Coding scripting languages and understanding the DOM is beyond 
most people, even me sometimes so that cannot be expected.
Using standard technologies is like building the Tower of Babel (except 
we are *not* trying to reach Heaven).  Using proprietary technologies is 
like building the Tower of Babel before God made man speak different 
languages.

>Simply declaring that "valid markup is better than invalid one" and
>"new XHTML is better than old HTML" or even "hand-written markup is
>better than generated markup" is not going to change much, IMHO. This
>is an "evangelist@w3" mailing list; does evangelism imply pro-active
>action or just stating personal preferences?
>  
>
-- 
Brant Langer Gurganus
http://troop545.cjb.net/brant.xhtml