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Best Quote (Today) About HTML

Phil Ringnalda provides a surgical view of the new MSN blog pages- beyond the wonderfully dense details, I loved this quote:

The HTML is, of course, execrable. The one possible way they could have gotten some approving buzz from tech bloggers was to use extremely clean (X)HTML, but given the apparent total lack of a corporate culture believing that code is poetry, at least when it comes to HTML, there was little hope of that. It might be possible to persuade Microsoft tools to produce valid HTML, but judging by what mostly comes out of them, they must think of HTML as a hot dog factory, where nobody in their right mind would ever look inside.

(my emphasis) Hah!

This rang a little closer to home as one of our colleges announced a preview of their new website proffered by Microsoft Content Management tools. It looks pretty, but under the hood (gack!) and I lost count watching how many things were being loaded, 70, 80, 90.... And the W3 HTML Validator blew a gasket.

I've sat on a fence (ouch) about whether pure validation is truly necessary, but one ought to at least be aiming towards it to be around for the long haul. Almost every time I visit a new site, I view the source, and there is a lot of crufty HTML out there (I have a pile of it myself, gulp).