So, the other night Glenn and Smith and I got to talking about standards, mostly discussing web standards. Smith was of the opinion that there was no point in validating HTML nor in using HTML that would work in any browser other than IE because of its market share. After a few hours of badgering, I think we were able to convince him of the importance of standards.

I think I'm the only web-authoring-centric blog in the world who didn't link to Mark's diatribe entitled "Semantic Obsolescence." Mark says "Standards are bullshit." While I can certainly understand his frustration, (just what the hell is wrong with <u> anyway?!) I think he's more upset with the W3C than he is with the standards themselves.

It's easy to get upset with them. Despite every effort, I still don't understand what their goal is. It doesn't seem like they're out to make HTML something that everyone can use, let alone do something crazy like, oh I don't know, edit HTML in a <textarea>. Maybe I should write them an email.

Dear W3C,

It's with some confusion that I watch HTML standards come out of your organization. Your focus seems to be in changing HTML from being a markup language that has some semantic, but mostly presentational tags into some bastardized form of a data storage language. SGML's already out there, kids. And let's not forget that XML is supposed to save the world from, well, everything.

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I don't read HTML source to determine the semantics of the information contained within the file. Nor do I take my HTML pages and convert them into a book or a brochure. In other words, I think most HTML documents fall into one of two categories: derived data -- pages built/converted from SGML or TeX or some other format, or disposable data. I'd say 99% of the web is disposable data. The only person who is going to be reading my ten-year-old blog entries is me, or someone with a personal connection with me.

We, (and when I say "We," I mean "I," (or possibly "me," depending upon the context)) want HTML to help us do stuff. We want to edit our blogs. We want to write complex applications that use and abuse all varieties of data via forms. We want new versions of your standards to be released to make these things easier, not simply for the sake of being new. Why not help us out?

In thickness,
Sam

See also: Metacrap and JWZ's recent rant.