Yes, it’d be nice if contractors kept up to date on the progress of the various building codes. They don’t. There are a lot of people who asked about the building codes in the 1970s and were told (right or wrong) what they were. So they went ahead and learned their trade, build their homes, and chose watching a DVD or spending time with their kids over watching city council do battle over asbestos insulation. Now all of a sudden they’re told that their work isn’t up to code any more. Some waiting and gnashing of teeth is to be expected. What’s needed is less “boy, aren’t I smarter than them” snideness and more “Hey, here’s what’s up.”
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Comments:
Youch.
Yeah, that's a fair comparison, because a set of standards mandated by law which could result in the deaths or continued misery of human beings is the same things as software companies arguing how you should close your tags.
Counter-snark aside, I agree with a large chunk of what I think your sentiment here is, mainly that professionalism matters, and it's better to fully understand every aspect what you're doing. Absolutely true, 100%.
What turns me off is people using their own professionalism to act unprofessional towards colleagues with different personal **and** professional priorities.
Condescendingly tell a manager they're being unprofessional because you want to spend 3 days fixing and regression testing the CMS so you can put your styles in the head of the document, when he asked you to bold someone's name, and see how far that gets you.
Is it fair to expect someone a design oriented web developer to understand, without explanation, that by serving their document as text/html the browser is invoking its tag soup parsing routines no matter what the doctype says, and that an actual XHTML parser is going to produce wildly different results?
Continuing with the building example, does a contractor need to know **why** the chemical composition of asbestos can lead to mesothelioma? It'd be kind of awesome and super professional if they did, but all they really need to know is "Don't use asbestos". With that knowledge, they can move forward and do what they're good at, which is making buildings.
"Is it fair to expect a design oriented web developer to understand, without explanation, that by serving their document as text/html the browser is invoking its tag soup parsing routines no matter what the doctype says, and that an actual XHTML parser is going to produce wildly different results?"
I'm not sure that's fair even _with_ explanation. If I verify my XHTML is valid XHTML (and I do), there's still an awfully good chance whatever web server pushes it out is going to cheerfully send it as text/html anyway -- and in my experience the chance approaches 1.00 that this will work just fine in the application that I've intended, no matter how much it makes purists rip out their hair.
Grammarians sometimes refer to a condition known as "hypercorrectness," wherein language purists insist on applying grammar rules in a sufficiently draconian fashion that they're actually making the text ungrammatical. I've come to suspect the battles over XHTML and "tag soup" are to some degree the web technologists' equivalent of hypercorrectness. :)
...now, back to learning what's up with Django 1.1.
It feels, like we are dropping XHTML and starting back at HTML4++. I wish we could have both, not separate but as one. Cool features of HTML5 and strong structure and presentation/structure separation of XHTML. XHTML looked like a great path forward, we followed it, we shouldn't have to give up it's strengths for new features.
I can see why we didn't go with XHTML 2, it was too much of a change. It was not pragmatic, more idealistic.
The new HTML5 looks great, I hope we don't lose the lessons from the past 9 years.
Fears as a web developer stemmed from Outlook 2007's rendering engine may be repeated in a way. Maybe someone could send some references that could calm my reactions?
It is funny that you bother talking about professionalism when your outward internet facing persona is not very professional. This does not negate what you've said about professionalism, it just suggests that you could try to be more professional.
Maybe the better question is where do you do draw the line between the personal and your professional life? Perhaps the personal should be private.
"strong structure and presentation/structure separation of XHTML"
What things that help separate presentation and structure exist in XHTML1 but not in HTML4?
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