21 June 2003

They say there is no such thing as bad publicity, but I definitely prefer when people defend me (both links in French, sorry). However, the latter kind of confirms the former, since without the pro-standard heinous asses there wouldn’t be a need for defending the garoo.

I’ll leave them among themselves if they’re having fun at it, but I just wanted to reply to a couple of sentences. (Translated from French by me.) Not that you care, really (everyone involved here writes in French, so you’ve never heard of them), but I made this really long post and there’s no reason you shouldn’t enjoy it too.

But someone who’s proud of making a site that won’t run on anything but his browser, and dodges all questions about CSS and others, that’s irritating sometimes.

I don’t dodge questions about CSS (and why CSS anyway? I use CSS!), it’s just that I have written quite enough on the subject in the past, so just refer to the archives. But what I want to answer is the rest: I don’t give a damn about running my HTML through the W3C’s validator, but that doesn’t mean my site only works with my own browser. First, because the browser I use is Mozilla, and something that runs through Mozilla is likely to work with everything else. Second, because I’ve been writing HTML for seven years now, and my sites have always been accessible for pretty much everybody. Hold on, let me reinstall Lynx (I don’t even test my pages with it anyway, I know the code I write is accessible). There. Well, you know what? I find it perfectly legible. But they didn’t care checking before they started bashing me, did they? And yet my site works, and that means it also works on a PDA, on a cell phone, and roughly works through vocal synthesis (it might screw the dates and times a bit, but that doesn’t matter that much; there aren’t even loads of contents to go through before you reach the main text!). What else do you want?

Corollary (here) :

If you’re blind, color-blind, old, or you’re browsing by ways I don’t know of, you’ll have to know I made my site to work on most common browsers, and since I don’t care to know about those standards things, you’ll have to leave, thanks for passing by.

Standards aficionados are funny. They’ve been convincing themselves so hard that, without W3C-made standards, the world is lost, now they really believe it. Well, yeah, you can make so-called invalid markup and yet be perfectly accessible to alternate browsing methods. Thing is, those people don’t profoundly care about accessibility (how many blind readers are there on your nerd blogs?); all they’re interested in is imposing rules for the sake of imposing them. Wasn’t the Internet supposed to be prone to anarchy a few years ago?!

However… you guys are even more megalomaniac, you know? My site is a blog. That means, it’s a personal sites. If a couple people can’t display it, well, I don’t care! I’m not running a business here!

To think that those idiots are the reason my legitimate readers can’t post comments anymore.

[…] at the time when there were comments, we gently laughed at him, sometimes we agreed, but we never were heinous.

My (non-)friend, imagine for a second that, everytime you open your mouth, everytime you say something — be it something polemic (like this post) or telling something intimate that nobody’s morally entitled to comment on — someone would come and make a derogatory comment. Oh, nothing really mean, just a little tease. Every day. Day after day, as long as your blog exists. You wouldn’t mind? Oh, silly me: asking people to imagine what it feels like for the people they bully, nothing could ever come out of this.

There’s just one thing that surprises me. In this thread, there hasn’t been any cries about me trying to get paid for making massively invalid sites. They must have forgotten, I suppose. So I’ll just make one last explanation: I’m not a new webdesigner out there. I’ve been making websites professionally since 1996, and I even have a tag-soup portfolio. Valid, invalid, black, green or red sites, I can do it all. How about you?

P.S. I almost want to enable comments again just for the fun of getting insulted about this post. But that would require implementing the new layout for commenting, which I didn’t do (yet).

P.S. Alright, as for the comments, it’s done. Meanwhile, I found a winner (I hate linking all those people, but, well, either that or I don’t discuss that topic, and I felt like discussing it, it seems). Want some evidence that my site is bad, bad, bad? Simple: it crashes Konqueror on a Zaurus! Whoa, as they say. I can bet that I, too, can crash a Zaurus, by typing garoo in uppercase in OpenOffice.org. Or by running Quake 3 on a Windows CE PDA.

No, wait. Windows CE isn’t as stupid as the Zaurus Linux, it’s not going to run something it can’t handle. (This is not an endorsement of Microsoft software; it’s just that it’s immensely stupid to run Konqueror on a PDA.) Gee, how idiotic can they get? I really feel bad for linking to that crap.