The Cafes » Web Development

A couple of months ago the Middlebury College history department banned students from citing Wikipedia in essays and exams. In particular the faculty statement said:

Whereas Wikipedia is extraordinarily convenient and, for some general purposes, extremely useful, it nonetheless suffers inevitably from inaccuracies deriving in large measure from its unique manner of compilation. Students are responsible for the accuracy of information they provide, and they cannot point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors.

However their reasoning is fatally flawed, and speaks toward poor education and worse pedagogy.
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A bogon is an element that appears in an HTML document, but has never been recognized by any browser. You’ll often find them by viewing source on pages written by XML geeks like me. I got the term from John Cowan’s TagSoup, which has, a --nobogons switch to suppress any elements it doesn’t recognize.

A semibogon (my own coinage) is an old element that used to be recognized by one or more browsers but is no longer. Examples include:

• marquee
• basefont
• bgsound
• keygen
• bgsound
• spacer
• wbr
• nobr

I’m trying to generate a reasonably complete list of these semibogons for Refactoring HTML. Can anyone add to this list?

When does a site start to stink? When do you know it’s time to refactor? These are questions I’m considering in Chapter 1 of my new book, Refactoring HTML. Here are some of the smells I’ve already written about:
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I’ve been agonizing over how to how to announce this. I’ve told a few friends, and I even let the cat slip out of the bag once on Mokka mit Schlag (though I pushed it back in) but I think rather than worrying any further I’m just going to do it. The contract has been signed and my next book will be:
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I am so sick of companies that scream about adding their addresses to my whitelist so they can get through my spam filters. Here’s one example from Hewlett Packard:

To ensure you properly receive your HP Technology at Work newsletter, and driver and support alerts, please add us-news@your.hp.com to your book. If you also receive the following e-mails from HP then add these addresses to your book:

• HP Monthly promotions newsletter:
  us-specials@your.hp.com
• Events and other general HP customer communications: us-bulletins@your.hp.com
• Order and support e-mail confirmations: Hewlett-Packard@confirm.hp.com

I have news for the corporate zombies and clueless marketdroids that design these sites and their e-mail bots:

If you’re getting caught in my spam filter, it’s your own damn fault!
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