Logic Isn’t His Strong Suit

The rea­sons for pub­lish­ing inac­cu­racy – laden tripe on the web are as var­ied as the lack – wits who write it. Some have a polit­i­cal agenda to push. Some are in it for the cash. Some just get a mas­sive erec­tion from piss­ing off ratio­nal peo­ple. But amongst these mis­cre­ants are the select few who have a need, a com­pul­sion if you will, to pack as much idiocy, faulty logic and inac­cu­racy into one arti­cle as they pos­si­bly can. Among these select few, the grand mas­ter is Daniel Eran Dilger and his Cavalcade of Sock – Puppets.

I nor­mally don’t seek out Dilger’s par­tic­u­lar brand of fuck­wit­tery, nor do I will­ingly read the drool­ing efflu­via from AppleInsider (one of his usual haunts), but the peo­ple have spo­ken, so I am now com­pelled to beat him up for the men­tal diar­rhea that he posted today at AppleInsider under the head­line “Why Apple is bet­ting on HTML 5: a web his­tory.”

My usual modus operandi with this sort of arti­cle is to first address the cen­tral the­sis of the piece, but, for the life of me I can’t fig­ure exactly what in the seven hells Daniel is hop­ing to accom­plish with this arti­cle. If there is a the­sis, it’s beyond my ken. So, given that, let’s bust out The Gin and just start from the begining.

The lead, where most sane authors state their the­sis, doesn’t help us much, but it does set us on our course for crazy – town right off the bat.

Despite mak­ing the vast major­ity of its money from hard­ware sales, Apple is invest­ing heav­ily in shap­ing the future of soft­ware. One exam­ple of this per­tains to HTML 5 and related web standards.

Apple is invest­ing in the future of soft­ware! Well slap my ass and call me Sally! No shit you froth­ing tool, Apple invests heav­ily in soft­ware. It’s called the mother fuck­ing oper­at­ing sys­tem you lack – wit! And I am shocked, shocked I say, to dis­cover that Apple, a com­pany that devel­ops prod­ucts that con­sumers use to access the Internet, is inter­ested in emerg­ing inter­net stan­dards. I would have thought that Apple would just say, “Fuck the web. Whatever Google and Microsoft come up with are cool by us.”

Daniel nat­ters on for another para­graph about Apple’s var­i­ous HTML pow­ered offer­ings (you know, the things that might make Apple inter­ested in the direc­tion of the HTML stan­dard) then attempts to pro­vide the ten­sion in the article.

Critics have com­plained that HTML 5 won’t be final­ized until 2012, and that its com­ple­tion might be irrel­e­vant any­way because Microsoft is unlikely to ever sup­port the new stan­dard within Internet Explorer. Others won­der if the world really needs any changes to the lan­guage under­ly­ing the web.

Really? Who are these “crit­ics?” Daniel, of course, can’t be both­ered to cite any. Of course he also raises the hoary old boogey­man, “Microsoft may choose to not sup­port Technology X, so we all may as well give up and pack it in.” Lastly, Daniel raises the specter that name­less “oth­ers” (could they be the Others from Lost, if so I wouldn’t worry, Richard Alpert is totally into the <can­vas> tag) don’t think that HTML needs any new work. If HTML 4.0 was good enough for grandpa, it’s good enough for them.

Daniel then pro­ceeds to spend the bulk of the next three pages, and forty – one fuck­ing para­graphs to detail the his­tory of the HTML stan­dard. I’ll smack around some par­tic­u­larly asi­nine state­ments from this gods – for­saken info – dump shortly, but first I want to com­ment on the for­mat itself.

This is some­thing that infu­ri­ates me. Some writ­ers, either suf­fer­ing from the delu­sion that adding a crap – load of irrel­e­vant infor­ma­tion makes them seem tech­ni­cally astute, or in a psy­chotic attempt to out – write the inim­itable John Siracusa, or des­per­ate to up their word – count go into excru­ci­at­ing detail in an arti­cle osten­si­bly aimed at a non – expert audi­ence. Don’t fuck­ing do this. The entire forty – one para­graphs could have been summed up as:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee devel­oped the ini­tial HTML spec­i­fi­ca­tion in 1989 and since then it has gone though numer­ous iter­a­tions. During this time browser sup­port of the var­i­ous HTML spec­i­fi­ca­tions has been incon­sis­tent at best. The cur­rent draft spec­i­fi­ca­tion is HTML 5.

Now that I have that off of my chest, let’s look at some choice bits of stu­pid from ol’ Danny – boy.

In order to draft HTML as a rec­om­men­da­tion to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) stan­dards body in 1993, Berners-Lee needed to pro­vide an exam­ple of an actual imple­men­ta­tion of HTML. He cited the Mosiac browser being devel­oped at the American NCSA, which had been funded by con­gress­man Al Gore as a part of a broad effort to pro­mote the devel­op­ment of high per­for­mance com­put­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions by lever­ag­ing the power of mar­ket forces using strate­gic gov­ern­ment investment.

This para­graph is actu­ally fairly accu­rate from a his­tor­i­cal stand­point, but I love the impli­ca­tion (via shoddy con­struc­tion) that Al Gore per­son­ally funded the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. By the way, if you’re going to expand some acronyms, you do it for all of them, Danny man­ages to fuck this up. But back to poor old Al Gore, I guess he will never live down invent­ing the Internet, will he.

Moving on.

The com­pletely open nature of HTML, backed by gov­ern­ment invest­ment in crit­i­cal imple­men­ta­tion work, enabled Berners-Lee’s new web to com­pletely over­turn the pock­ets of incom­pat­i­ble, pro­pri­etary Internet ser­vices that were in the process of divid­ing users up between the silos of AOL, CompuServe, GEnie, MSN, and sim­i­lar offerings.

In the quiet words of the Virgin Mary, come again? Having worked in the Internet Service Provider indus­try at the exact time that AOL and the other “walled gar­den” providers were implod­ing, I can cat­e­gor­i­cally state that this asser­tion is pure fic­tion. There were many fac­tors that went into the demise of AOL and com­pany, the exis­tence of a fuck­ing markup lan­guage was not one of them.

And we’re walking:

HTML’s pub­lic def­i­n­i­tion as an open stan­dard allowed any­one to to set up a server with web page doc­u­ments that any web browser on any plat­form could dis­play. As the real­ity of this tremen­dous new poten­tial began to sink in, Microsoft real­ized that the web would not just be a threat to its pro­pri­etary new MSN ser­vice, but would also be used by com­pa­nies to reduce their depen­dance on Windows, allow­ing them to buy prod­ucts from any ven­dor. This sparked its war with Netscape on the imple­men­ta­tion side, but there would also be wars on the web stan­dards side.

Where to fuck­ing begin? First, HTML has fuck all with the abil­ity for the aver­age chump to set up a pub­lic web server; mainly because HTML is a gods damned markup lan­guage. HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is the actual trans­port used to deliver HTML doc­u­ments (amongst other things). To the extent that it was pos­si­ble for an indi­vid­ual to set up a web server (hint, short of acad­e­mia and com­mer­cial providers it wasn’t pos­si­ble for many years) it was the open source Apache HTTP server that allowed it. HTML was, and always will be text with some funky tags. The rest of the bab­ble about com­pa­nies reduc­ing their depen­dence on Microsoft is too inco­her­ent to parse.

Next:

Netscape was pri­mar­ily inter­ested in rapidly cre­at­ing a way to deliver web pages that could catch the atten­tion of con­sumers, so the addi­tions it began adding to HTML included tags the spec­i­fied things like a back­ground color for the page, or spe­cific font faces for text. To aca­d­e­mics, this inap­pro­pri­ately mixed pre­sen­ta­tion into a stan­dard that ide­ally should only present descrip­tive seman­tics of how the doc­u­ment was organized.

This is just utter fic­tion. Danny-boy cites absolutely fuck­ing noth­ing to back up these assertions.

Are we done yet, my head hurts:

Meanwhile, Netscape’s lead­er­ship in the browser mar­ket was chal­lenged by Microsoft, which in 1995 licensed the orig­i­nal Mosiac code and began fork­ing it off in a new direc­tion in an effort to pre­vent the web from being defined by group of com­pa­nies (pri­mar­ily Netscape and Sun) that had a vested inter­est in break­ing up Microsoft’s grip on the PC oper­at­ing sys­tem market.

Fuck me, at the rate I’m guz­zling the Tanqueray Rangpur, I may not make it through this one. While Microsoft, being Microsoft, cer­tainly wanted con­trol of the nascent web, to extrap­o­late that this was because Netscape had the slight­est inter­est in affect­ing Microsoft’s so – called “grip” on the PC mar­ket is pure MacMac fantasy.

Ooh, speak­ing of MacMac fantasy:

It’s impor­tant to note that HTML 5 isn’t one big dif­fi­cult leap like mov­ing from Windows XP to Vista, or from IPv4 to IPv6.

Gods help me for defend­ing Windows Vista, but an oper­at­ing sys­tem upgrade isn’t fuck­ing dark elven magic you ape. Also, Dilger dis­plays a charm­ing lack of under­stand­ing of what’s involved in mov­ing from IPv4 to IPv6 (hint, for most peo­ple, not a fuck­ing thing).

Please daddy, make the bad man stop writ­ing, I won’t be noisy anymore:

Despite the poten­tial threats to Office and Windows that HTML 5 deliv­ers, Microsoft also sees the need to par­tic­i­pate in HTML 5 because its browser share has now dipped to around 65%.

The sound you just heard was a vein in my head pop­ping. Somehow Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows are threat­ened by a fuck­ing markup lan­guage! That makes as about as much sense as claim­ing that the orbit of Jupiter is threat­ened by a mouse fart. It’s not merely a mat­ter of scale, but of mas­sive orthogonality.

Finally, after three pages of weird, revi­sion­ist fan­tasy (includ­ing one of AppleInsider’s patented incom­pre­hen­si­ble dia­grams) Dilger comes to his fin­ish­ing move. An act of illog­i­cal prowess so mag­nif­i­cent that I feel com­pelled to give it a name. Henceforth, the appli­ca­tion of a con­clu­sion that in no way shape or form fol­lows from the pro­ceed­ing argu­ments shall be known as, “The Dilger.”

Once Adobe real­izes it can make more money sell­ing author­ing tools for HTML 5 than it can in cater­ing to a dwin­dling group of Flash design­ers, its out­look is likely to change dra­mat­i­cally. That shift from plu­gin main­te­nance to standards-based tool cre­ation will enable the com­pany to rely upon a plat­form cre­ated by the com­mu­nity, largely Mozilla and WebKit, rather than try­ing to imple­ment its Flash, Flash Lite, and AIR run­times on dif­fer­ent hard­ware plat­forms and within dif­fer­ent browsers. Because clearly that isn’t working.

Let that one soak in. Revel in the crazy. Adobe will shit – can it’s multi-billion dol­lar invest­ment in Flash to become an exclu­sive provider of HTML edi­tors. It’s a good thing I’m as drunk as I am, or I might just stroke out.

There you have it kid­dies, the peo­ple spoke, and it was done. Now, see­ing as how I can’t feel my teeth, I’m going to have my stom­ach pumped.

too­dles