Comments for Hope
Thanks for the sanity. Maybe it would be an idea to group these ideas under a common heading, a little bit like the 'DRY' of rails fame. I'm not sure what it shuold be called though. Don't shoot yourself in the head? 'DSYITH' :)
It might be naive, but one could draw an analogy between the Open Web debate, and the debate relating multiculturalism and the Open Society.
Multiculturalism seems to involve the problem of the extent to which any one culture should be able to eclipse the others, and what set of common values should be protected that enabled the that society to be capable of sustaining multiculturalism in the first place?
Lets call it the Multicultural Web : everyone should respect the standards, but at the same time, respect the different cultures which Microsoft, Sun, Adobe etc bring? Yuk!
Tag soup is all well and good until you want to write a browser. Currently digesting tag soup is such a difficult thing to do there are only 4 big browsers, and all of them suck in different ways. All because of their different interpretations of broken HTML and Javascript. You can't even write stuff that conforms to standards because each browser has stuff that conforms to what it felt like doing before standards and they don't drop standard interfaces over it. It's just taken me several days to get IE and Firefox to behave the same way for an app I'm creating. It took about 2 hours to get the behaviour out of Firefox, and the rest of the time to get code that worked in both browsers and crashed neither.
Standards are there to make life easier, not harder.