Easy! Reader

I wasn't planning to weigh in much on this subject, but I've been asked by several people for my thoughts, so here we go...

This decision by the W3C to not renew the charter for the XHTML 2 Working Group has, rather unfortunately, brought out the worst in the Web standards community. Sure, as a community, we're prone to holy wars over seemingly inconsequential things—abbr vs. acronym, use vs. abuse of definition lists, etc.—but this move has sparked a particularly ugly fight between proponents of XHTML and its detractors (primarily those folks who think it's pointless to use XHTML if you aren't serving it with an XML MIME type).

Personally, I have mixed feelings about the decision. I think there were a lot of good ideas in XHTML 2 (everything can be a link, for one), but it also had a number of shortcomings. I feel much the same about HTML 5; some of the new elements make a lot of sense, but others seem to be solving a problem that really wasn't there to begin with.

In the end, I think this is probably a good move for the W3C as it will, hopefully, allow them to reallocate resources to projects that need them.

But does it mean I think XHTML is a failure? No.

I think XHTML was a phenomenal success as it made us look at HTML in a new light. It forced us to think about how we marked up documents and applied much-needed pressure on developers to make smarter decisions. Without it, I dare say the Web standards movement would never have gotten as much traction as it did and we would still be in the midst of the browser war started more than a dozen years ago.

After making a ridiculously stupid mistake by axing the server that hosted this blog (without checking that I had actually moved it to the new server and without making sure I had a backup of the DB), Easy! Reader is back. Sort of. Thankfully, I had a backup from late '06 and I haven't been an incredibly prolific blogger in the time since that backup. And, thanks to the Internet Archive, it looks like we should be able to recover all but one article (my last post, from about a year ago) from the ether. It may take a little time, but we should have it all up in the next few weeks.

So what's going on? Well, a lot.

For one, we've relocated from New Haven, CT to Chattanooga, TN after being urged to visit by Mr. Shaun Inman and his lovely bride Leslie and falling in love with this awesome city. We made the move in August of last year and, after spending a few months in an apartment, have bought a house and will be moving in this weekend. Chattanooga is an amazing place. There's always something going on, it has a wonderful art scene and tech community, and is nestled in the mountains, right along the Tennessee River. It has many of the perks of Portland, OR and San Francisco, CA (other cities we considered moving to), but at 1/4-1/3 the cost. I couldn't ask for a better place to live.

Since relocating, Easy! Designs has also been growing. We've taken on two interns -- Matt Turnure and Sean McCarthy -- and have been joined full-time by both Dave Stewart (who I had previously worked with in CT) and Matt Harris (an excellent developer from the UK), so expect to be hearing from them on this site soon as well. In addition to our client work, we've been busily coding away on a few products of our own that should hopefully see the light of day in the coming year. We're also working on a relaunch of our own website and this blog.

Finally, there's eCSStender. I've been working on this project for ages and it's currently in a closed beta. Things are progressing smoothly on its development though and I expect it will be ready for its initial public release in the coming weeks.

Anyway, that's the nickel tour of the changes. I apologize profusely for rendering this blog pretty useless with my error, but hopefully we'll have it all back up and running shortly.

PS - If you happen to have an archive of my blog post on IE8 Standards Mode, please forward a copy of it to me. I can't seem to find it even though it appears to be somewhere in the Google Cache.

As some of you have read (or heard), WaSP organized a Round Table discussion on IE8’s standards mode and its default behavior of opting-out any sites that don’t engage in version targeting. We discussed a few different aspects of the issues this presents for standards-aware developers (and progress on the web in general) and discussed a few tacks Microsoft could take to make IE8 more standardista-friendly.

One proposal that, to me, appeared to hold the most promise was one that involved extending IE8’s scheme of automatically opting-in unknown valid DOCTYPEs to also include Strict DOCTYPEs of HTML and XHTML currently in use. The current proposal hinges on the relative popularity (or unpopularity) of a given DOCTYPE: unrecognized DOCTYPEs are assumed to be future or custom DOCTYPEs and will automatically be opted-in to the latest and greatest standards mode of any given future version of IE; that is, until that DOCTYPE becomes “popular” enough to warrant associating it with a given version of IE. This, in a nutshell, means that if a new DOCTYPE were to come along after IE8 launches—say, HTML 5—IE8 would render it in standards mode, but if that DOCTYPE became “popular” before IE9 came out, IE9 would likely act as though it was IE8 when rendering those pages.

Chris Wilson did not have numbers on the relative popularity of Strict mode DOCTYPEs vs. Transitional and Frameset on either HTML or XHTML, but given that most authoring tools do not automatically generate Strict documents, it is a strong possibility that the popularity of Strict mode DOCTYPEs may make them a candidate for being automatically opted-in to standards mode, at least in IE8. That would be great news for standards-aware developers who want IE8’s standards improvements, but don’t want to engage in version targeting.