Today’s comic, which features a massive ensemble cast of Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Cederholm, Jeremy Keith, Eric Meyer, Ethan Marcotte, Tantek Çelik, Nicole Sullivan and Wendy Chisholm (guest starring Chris Wilson astride a unicorn), is something like gloss and candy. It’s not tackling a serious issue. Rather, it’s tackling a humorous name created by a group of great people who are themselves tackling a serious issue.

As this photo conclusively proves, the people above (minus Chris Wilson and the unicorn) gathered in the recent past to discuss something very vital. Contrary to popular rumor, it was not the secret location of the Holy Grail or harnessing the power of cold fusion. Nay, they were instead talking about HTML5. More importantly, they were talking about HTML5 as “authors”. For pretty much anyone who reads this blog and doesn’t work for a browser manufacturer, that means you, or your son (if your my parents. Hi mom! Hi dad!)

Like the Hardy Boys, these people were industriously searching for clues, especially clues along the line of “what the hell is HTML5 anyway, and how does it apply to a web designer?” After spelunking the depths of the spec, they surfaced with two things: Firstly, they declared that it was good. Secondly, (and for my purposes, more importantly) they chose  an identity to bind them: The HTML5  Super Friends.

Today’s comic is comedic salute to their bravery and choice of identity. They’ve already done us a great deal of good by recommending alterations to the footer element (which was already a source of annoyance to yours truly) which has now come to pass.

Keep up the noble work, dear heroes.

(And in case you wanted to know, Chris Wilson’s appearance was due to his tweet here regarding the presence of the unicorn on the HTML5 Super Friends page.)

Sooner or later HTML5 will not be the most interesting topic to wax poetic about. This is not that day.

I’m usually in sync with the web-related posts written by Jeremy Keith over at his personal site, Adactio. He’s usually saying something I’m thinking (albeit with more eloquence than I could muster), or spouts some gem of wisdom that I wish I’d thought of first. As such, it is safe to say that I respect him and, normally, his opinion.

This weekend, however, he wrote firmly on the topic of HTML5 and its process, in The HTML5 Equilibrium. In doing so, he made a sort of sandwich. The opening and closing of his post were two delicious, carefully toasted buns of high quality. But firmly settled in between them was a rank egg salad segment where he detailed his view on the W3C/WHAT WG “split personality”, ruining my appetite for his creation.

I’ve never been able to stomach egg salad sandwiches.

My reaction was spawned by his discussion of the status of Ian “Hixie” Hickson as the dictator-for-life of HTML5, sitting astride a position of absolute power in how the spec is edited. As readers probably know by now, there’s been plenty of friction lately between the HTML5 efforts and every other W3C group known to man as Ian’s been refuting their expert advice in exchange for his own pseudo-expert opinion on a wide range of topics.

Keith comes to Hixie’s defense by stating that although an unelected autocrat is horrible, it can work quite well. He evokes the power of dictatorship by referencing Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and quoting Shakespeare’s Henry V. Specifically, he states that by doing so we transfer “moral responsibility” from the populace to the dictator, then goes on to say that Ian has taken this mantle and used it evenhandedly and fairly.

In short, Jeremy uncouples the means from the ends. Leviathan, written in the 17th century, is a text that firmly opposes Separation of Powers and refutes the Right of Rebellion, claims the sovereign’s acts are incapable of being considered unjust, and makes it unjust for the populace to attempt to unseat the sovereign.

In short, do what you’d like, Hixie. It won’t be our fault, because we’ve given you all the power, and from here on out we’re blameless. But at the same time, should we disagree with you, tough for us. It’s all your show now.

And really, that’s what it’s become. The Hixie Show. The amount of “not invented here” mentality that evades the modern HTML5 spec is odious. Accessibility in HTML5 isn’t being decided by experts. Process, when challenged through W3C guidelines, is defended as being “not like the old ways”, in essence slapping the W3C in the face. Ian’s made it clear he won’t play by the rules. When well-meaning experts carefully announce their opposing positions and desire for some form of closing the gaps, Ian and the inner circle constantly express how they don’t understand. This understanding issue has reached a comedic point. When Sam Ruby pressed them on the subject during an objection by John Foliot (as noted here), Ian’s response is a glib “I don’t understand John’s concerns. He hasn’t explained them. He has just made unsubstantiated demands.”

This phrase (“I don’t understand”) is used by Ian so frequently that I’m genuinely concerned. He’s ostensibly a bright man. The usual objections and positions by other parties in the HTML5 dialogue are incredibly well documented at this point, in staggering detail. To claim the inability to understand exhibits one of two traits: Either Ian is a simpleton, or he is deliberately “misunderstanding”.

I don’t think it’s the former. Ian has clearly demonstrated his phenomenal intelligence. Yet, the latter option is part of Ian’s well documented deny, delay, too late methodology for handling people. Engaging in this sort of behavior is disrespectful of his community of peers, and more than discouraging when its coming from our empowered Leviathan.

We must accept this, though. Because it’s the results that matter, right? If we get a HTML5 spec, any HTML5 spec, we should be happy about it. Despite all the assurances to the contrary, I can’t really believe that it’s acceptable to consider a product’s method of construction to be independent from its quality. If so, I should be paying far less for my garments, right?

There’s a thought process here that is so far removed from the 21st century as to be terrifying.

In today’s comic, Jeremy Keith reveals the Leviathan to the Squirrel. Things go badly. But remember, it’s only the Leviathan’s fault, because we’ve absolved ourselves of both power and responsibility.

Right?

Last week, it was declared that the XHTML2 WG was being discontinued, so the resources could be focused on HTML5. I briefly mentioned it here, and Jeffrey Zeldman spoke about it here. It’s a simple enough matter, and drew a lot of mixed responses. That in itself isn’t surprising.

What was surprising was how all of a sudden it seemed that it became open hunting season on insulting developers that used XHTML 1 (which is not XHTML2) and gloating over the corpse of the standard before it had even cooled. As two examples, Henri Sivonen produced an unofficial “Q&A” complete with snark, and Mark Pilgrim invented a taunting childish rhyme that reveled in the folly of those he disagreed with. Pilgrim in his case even named Jeffrey Zeldman directly in his taunts (and got even worse in behavior in his comments on that post.)

This sort of behavior annoys me on two levels. One, it’s not a great way to treat your professional peers, as it crosses the line from attacking a technology to attacking people. Two, it confuses (in some cases intentionally) XHTML and XHTML2, making it seem as if the death of the latter somehow invalidated the former, which isn’t the case at all.

Fortunately, good men didn’t let that sort of behavior slide. John Allsopp rightfully called some of the taunters out for their snark (as recorded in this tweet here), and that became the basis for today’s comic, which imagines a post-apocalyptic world where this sort of poor manners must be corrected by brave warriors in the wasteland.

Also helping correct misconceptions and bad behavior were good posts by Jeremy Keith and Jeffrey Zeldman. If you’re confused about the whole XHTML issue this week, take a look at what they’ve written. It’s instructive.

Was XHTML2′s death a good thing? I don’t know. I do know that we can discuss the technology in a fashion that doesn’t involve insulting the people involved, though. Keep it clean, folks.

Note: I wrote this in about eight minutes at the end of my lunch. As such, it might expand later when I have the chance to be more verbose and thoughtful.

In one week, An Event Apart will be in Seattle. Seattle is less than a two hour drive from Bellingham, which is where Mindfly Web Studio is located and where I live.

It’s a gorgeous town. It’s also a bit too small to attract the conference circuit.

Having never been to An Event Apart, I would love to attend one that is so close. But the conference budget was used to attend the fabulous Web Directions North 2009 in Denver, and I’m additionally in the process of getting ready to move to a new apartment, so I can’t justify the expense.

Poor me. As tempting as it would be to go Annie Wilkes-style and abduct a presenter as today’s comic suggests (featuring Eric Meyer in the role of victim), I think I’ll pass on becoming a kidnapper and just cope with the disappointment.

However, along with a couple other Mindfliers, I am looking to see what interest there is in the local web developer community in forming a wagon train and crashing whatever social events are occurring in the evening after the conference stops for the day. Details are sketchy on who, how, or with what vehicles, but if you’re local, and you’re interested, feel free to start tweeting me about it.

The real debate is what day, and what venue. Perhaps some Seattleites or AEA organizers could shed some useful light into this? Monday seems like the right night, but the MT Opening Night party is likely an attendees-only event that would take up a huge chunk of the available social time, resulting in us Bellinghamsters crouching outside in some sort of tent city, hawking “Death to IE6″ wares and playing the bongos.

Actually, your average Bellinghamster doesn’t need an excuse to start playing drums and making hand-made necklaces. Things get a bit granola-esque up here.

Of course, even if I miss the event and it’s pool of attendees completely, I plan to haunt the web’s stream of useful notes, presentations, and articles that will pop up in it’s wake. I love that part of this industry.

Speaking of conferences, Jeremy Keith put up a blog post discussing his presentation at Bamboo Juice, which helps illustrate his impression of thinking long term (which I touched on in my last comic update). I’d like to point out in particular the line: “Think about what you would put on the gold disc attached to Voyager; now publish that material online.”

As of yet, I can think of nothing that I’ve ever generated as content, online, on paper, or otherwise, that deserves to take up space on a probe’s first contact disc. That is, unless topical humor about web standards counts as memorable. Which makes me wonder, what was humor like in Sumer? I can’t help but feel that largely the jokes wouldn’t translate well.

There’s been a lot of discussion (read that: unholy firestorm) lately about URL shorteners, link rot, and solutions to prevent a zombie link apocalypse where a large portion of the Internet’s links suddenly become useless undead anchors within a single fortnight. Today’s comic presents a pair of survivors trying to live in such a world gone wrong, starring Jeremy Keith.

For anyone who’s new to the fray, this is basically what’s going on: As most of you know, popular social services like Twitter exist. Twitter uses TinyURL as a shortener for URLs tweeted to help keep character counts down. Third party shorteners, while convenient, pose the threat of someday going under. This will result in millions of hyperlinks on the Internet that would no longer work, causing link rot. As we all should know, link rot is bad.

Those taking the long picture, such as Jeremy Keith (who’s view of the long picture is much more than most considering his thoughts of concepts such as the Long Now, which is even farther ahead than I can even bother thinking about), are already suggesting solutions today to prevent link rot from killing the Internet’s usefulness in that grim day when these shorteners disappear. One such solution is rev=”canonical”, which Jeremy has discussed at least twice now. It seems like a reasonable option, and far preferable to a rabble of links that rot with no backup plan attached.

Now, by and large the resulting debate hasn’t been whether short url-related link rot is a problem. The real argument is whether the proposed solution’s use of rev is somehow confusing, or whether good alternatives already exist, etc. However, hidden throughout these discussions are little comments like this one from Shelley Powers:

I hate to break it to the folks so worried, but it will probably be a cold day in hell before anyone digs into Twitter archives. Most of us can’t keep up with the stream of tweets we get today, much less worry about yesterday’s or last week’s.

I don’t think that Shelley is actually trying to say “there is no problem,” but I can’t help but feel that the comment is fairly short-sighted, and reflective of a certain prevailing mindset that the issue at hand isn’t largely a serious one because of the medium that’s most exposed: Twitter and other social networks. After all, we each have our own blogs, right? All the smart people on the web are home-brewing their own websites, correct?

I think we sometimes forget how we, as developers, represent a small subset of the Internet’s population. And that in addition to our own blogs and sites we use these services ourselves. The fact is, I like to favorite tweets to follow important links later. If I follow someone interesting, I’m inclined to dig through their past posts to see interesting things they’ve talked about. The first hit on Google for “Kyle Weems” that is me (and not a basketball player or yo-yo champion) is (for better or worse) my Twitter account. Heck, the vast majority of my site’s non-direct traffic comes from links via Twitter, some of which are months old. Regardless of what you think of the quality of these networks, they generate a large amount of content and connect to a lot of content elsewhere. If suddenly all the links went dead, it would kill off a great deal of the web’s existing site-to-site traffic.

So although I’ve yet to build my own URL shortener, I clearly think it’d benefit me to do so because URL shortening is a problem that will affect me (and the rest of us) negatively in the future if we continue to use third party shorteners. Although I don’t know if rev=”canonical” is the proper solution, I think we need to ensure that we focus on a quick implementation of something. Even if the functionality to make use of it isn’t there yet, coding for it now will prevent more headaches later. The pace at which new links are being generated each day is staggering, and the sooner we turn things around, the less tragic the zombie link apocalypse will be for us all.