Divine Lunacy

Imagine a world with no Official languages. A world in which each village has own dialect. A world in which communications between groups of people is impossible. Official languages prevent such a world by “forcing” everyone to speak the same language, but that’s a whole different topic. I don’t want to get started on why we need to make English our official language before the Spanish people assimilate us in our own country. Anyway… If I am so inclined, I can send an email to a mac user in England (I use Linux). The mac user in England will be able to read my email because although our computers are running different operating systems, they speak a common language. This is ensured by standards such as ASCII, ANSI, and ISO. I am using ISO 8859-1; the mac probably isn’t using ISO 8859-1, but it most likely knows how to read it. The character set is specified in the email headers. I can go to a variety of websites, and my browser of choice, Firefox, will have no problem displaying them. This is also due to standards. The w3c, or world wide web consortium was formed in 1994 to oversee open standards for the internet. Without a single organization overseeing standards, different websites would be coded in different languages, and not all browsers would be able to display every website. The internet would be much like the hell described at the beginning of this paragraph.

While many websites willingly comply with w3c recommendations, some seem to go out of their way to shit all over standards. Myspace is one of these websites. Even though I believe myspace is the root of all evil, I’ve been on it a lot more lately. Each time I type myspace.com into the address bar, I loathe Tom even more than before, and fear his horrible coding will yet again crash Firefox. Any website that crashes firefox doesn’t deserve to live. I’m not trying to say Firefox is perfect. (I know it isn’t.) Firefox’s poor memory management could be used to frighten small children. (adapted that from a Linus quote). In many respects, Opera is a better browser, but this post isn’t about which browser is better—it’s about which website sucks at life. That website being none other than myspace. Anyway… Just for fun, I figured I’d run my profile through the w3c markup validator. The profile is over 1000 errors away from being flawless XHTML 1.1. Tom wouldn’t know valid [X]HTML if it challenged him to a duel.

In addition to using bad markup, myspace goes out of its way to promote the use thereof. The default style of a myspace profile is boring to say the least. To remedy this, users have taken to using CSS and HTML to spice things up. Unfortunately, myspace was not designed for this kind of customization. Profile customizations are hacks at best, and some effects can only be achieved by blatantly disregarding standards. Fortunately, the casual user is not at fault in this case. The myspace profile system is lacking in many areas. A system similar to the blogger template system would be quite nice.

For those of you who haven’t noticed, I do a lot of whining, but rarely do anything about it. Well, I’m not doing anything about myspace either. I would jump at the opportunity to help design an open, compliant, alternative, but I lack the resources, time, and funding to undertake such a project by myself. I just hope someone gets to it before myspace corrupts the whole world. If we’re lucky, Google will own the world before that time, and Google Groups will challenge myspace groups to a battle to the death… Robozombie Google Vs. Myspace. (Google will kick Myspace’s ass any day. {robozombie or not} Their 52 week range is roughly $116-$358. Kick ass.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 30th, 2005 at 2159:39 and is filed under dev/tech, Rants, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.