Simon Willison’s Weblog

I’m renaming the book to “Dive Into HTML 5” for better SEO. This is not a joke. The book is the #5 search result for “HTML5” (no space) but #13 for “HTML 5” (with a space). I get 514 visitors a day searching Google for “HTML5” but only 53 visitors a day searching for “HTML 5”.

— Mark Pilgrim # 8th June 2010, 8:48 pm

HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.

— Mark Pilgrim # 3rd November 2009, 7:20 am

You count the “value” that is lost by people who would have made money selling rival goods, but can’t now because they can’t compete with free. But you don’t count the value that is created by people who build upon the freely given goods. [...] In other words, you only look at the first-order effects. It’s the same mistake a lot of people make when they accuse open source developers of “dumping” and ruining the market for competing software. That’s true, in a very narrow sense, but it ignores all the other people who took that software and used it to create something else of value.

— Mark Pilgrim # 21st October 2009, 9:59 am

Yes, it’d be nice if everyone kept up to date on the progress of the various W3C working groups. They don’t. There are a lot of people who asked what professional markup looked like and were told (right or wrong) that XHTML was the future. So they went ahead and learned XHTML, built their websites and chose watching a DVD or spending time with their kids over watching Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby do battle over Postel’s Law. Now all of a sudden they’re told XHTML is dead. Some wailing 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.

— Alan Storm # 4th July 2009, 12:51 pm

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll quote Jamie Zawinski.” Now they have two problems.

— Mark Pilgrim # 25th February 2009, 10:06 pm

There. Is. No. Long-Term. Data. Storage. Solution. There is only a series of short-term solutions punctuated by data migration from one medium to the next.

— Mark Pilgrim # 13th December 2008, 11:36 pm

My Universal Feed Parser was conceived as a weapon against what I considered the gravest error of XML: draconian error handling. Recently, someone asked me to implement a switch that makes it not fall back on lax parsing in the case of an XML wellformedness error. I said no, not because it would be difficult to implement, but because that defeats its entire reason for being.

— Mark Pilgrim # 5th August 2008, 10:52 pm

NOTE TO INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPERS: PLEASE DO NOT MAKE SERIOUS ANNOUNCEMENTS ON INTERNET JACKASS DAY.

— Mark Pilgrim # 1st April 2008, 10:58 pm

For the record, my site is valid HTML 5, except the parts that aren’t. My therapist says I shouldn’t rely so much on external validation.

— Mark Pilgrim # 10th March 2008, 2:01 pm

I thought the big draw for Apple hardware was that “It Just Works.” By breaking it, you must know you’re giving up the “Just Works” factor, so what’s left? Rounded corners?

— Mark Pilgrim # 5th October 2007, 4:32 pm

Apple doesn’t give a damn. Steve Jobs doesn’t build platforms, except by accident. He doesn’t care about your thriving metropolis. All you independent Mac developers: you’re all sharecroppers, and your rent just went up. Way up.

— Mark Pilgrim # 12th January 2007, 9:51 am