In Nomine - The Lotus Land

I needed to look up something within a XHTML specification over at the W3 Consortium website. So I went to the XHTML2 Working Group Home Page. I was greeted with various encoding issues. Trademarks showing up as â„¢ character sequences. Now, normally when you see a page with an  or â at the start of a strange sequence you can be fairly certain it is a Unicode encoding, typically UTF-8. So at first I thought my auto-detect within Firefox was not turned on, checked it, no, it was definitely on. Selected unicode as encoding myself and, indeed, the page displayed normally. So I checked the page’s source. I was lovingly greeted by the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

I am sure most of you can appreciate the delightful irony that the organization that has a multitude of XML-based standards and specifications, which almost always use UTF-8 as default encoding, encode a page wrongly. Yes, mistakes are human, but to see something like this on the W3C site…

Edit: for some reason Wordpress keeps converting my greater and lesser than signs into HTML entities, even when using Unicode entities.

OK, one problem with the current site is that the sidebar might get pushed below the content section if the width of the browser is not sufficient.

Suggested fixes are more than welcome.

The standards body we thought would help us get the Internet better in shape is actually dying at the hands of elitist members.

The Internet started with open standards and code that formed the IP stack with the BSD Unix software. Later Tim Berners Lee and other people ensured we were able to work with HTML and all these specifications were open and people actively worked to get innovation and fixes in.

Now, since a number of years the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has become the domain where the ones who can pay the membership fees ($50.000 seems normal) get a voice and individuals without such backing are left in the cold.

For some examples, read:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qa-dev/2006Jul/0011
http://www.zeldman.com/2006/07/17/an-angry-fix/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tohellwithwcag2/
http://www.dzr-web.com/people/darren/blog/2006/07/12/is-the-w3c-failing-us/

I am getting so tired of the Internet Explorer shows it perfectly, but it fails with browser X or Y rhetoric.

Once and for all people: the Internet has standards. That Microsoft choses not to play nice with this is not the fault of the people developing sites that do play nice with standards.

Instead, bother Microsoft to fix their browser’s dumb behaviour.