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January 12, 2006

The 3000 Day Web Page

Don Knuth wants to know what he needs to do in order to ensure his web page is readable for the next 3000 days. His old (and curious) DTD for his web site was , which he has used and validated since 1996 (!!!). That DTD was deprecated recently by the W3C, and now Mr. Knuth wants to know if he must sacrifice a week otherwise spent toiling on his life's work to the vagaries of the W3C's fashionista Web 2.0 policies.

Turns out there are two issues. First, Knuth was using an old-and-busted, non-standard DTD that wasn't even available on the web anymore (which means any new web browser would not be able to guarentee support). One point from Mr. Knuth. Second, the validator folks removed the DTD without notification, when they knew that the DTD would work most of the time and was pretty close to other, standard DTDs. One point from Web Standards.

What did I learn? Standards are not possible at the beginning of something new, but they need to happen, and when they come, make the compliance process as friendly, verbose, and easy as possible.

Kudos to Dare Obsanjo for spotting and blogging this thread.

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