Recently, Sam Ruby announced that the Atom 0.3 syndication format would be deprecated by the Feed Validator. When I first read his post I half wondered what would happen if someone complained about being told their previously valid feed was no longer valid simply because it was now using an "old" format. This afternoon I found an email from Donald Knuth (yes, that one) to the www-validator@w3.org mailing list complaining about just that. In his mail note from Prof Knuth, he writes
Dear Validators,I've been happily using your service for many years --- even before w3ctook it over. I've had a collection of web pages at Stanford since1995 or so; it now amounts to hundreds of pages, dozens of which havetens of thousands of hits, several of which have hits in the millions.Every time I make a nontrivial change, I've been asking the validatorto approve it. And every time, I've won the right to display the"HaL HTML Netscape checked" logo.Until today. Alluva sudden you guys have jerked the rug out fromunder my feet.I protest! I feel like screaming! Unfair!I'm not accustomed to flaming, but I have to warn you that I am just now more than a little hot under the collar and trying not to explode.For years and years, I have started each webpage with the formulaI found in the book from which I learned HTML many years ago, namely <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//Netscape Comm. Corp.//DTD HTML//EN">Today when I tried to validate a simple edit of one page, I foundthat your system no longer is happy --- indeed, it hates everyone of my webpages. (If you need a URL, Google for "don" and takethe topmost page, unless you are in France.)For example, it now finds 19 errors on my home page, which was 100%valid earlier this month. The first error is "unknown parse mode!".Apparently Stanford's Apache server is sending the page out as text/html.You are saying text/html is ambiguous, but that you are going to continueas if it were SGML mode. Fine; but if I get the Stanford folks tochange the MIME type to SGML mode, I'll still have 18 more errors.The next error is "no DOCTYPE found". But guys, it is there asplain as day. Henceforth you default to HTML 4.01 Transitional.Then you complain that I don't give "alt" specifications withany of the images. But the Netscape DTD I have used for morethan 3000 days does not require it.Then you don't allow align="absmiddle" in an image.I went to your help page trying to find another DTD that mightsuit. Version 2.0 seemed promising; but no, it failed in otherways --- like it doesn't know the bgcolor and text color attributesin the <body> of my page.Look folks, I know that software rot (sometimes called "progress")keeps growing, and backwards compatibility is not always possible.At one point I changed my TeX78 system to TeX82 and refused tosupport the older conventions.But in this case I see absolutely no reason why system people whoare supposedly committed to helping the world's users from allthe various cultures are suddenly blasting me in the face andtelling me that you no longer support things that every decentbrowser understands perfectly well.To change all these pages will cost me a week's time. I don'twant to delay The Art of Computer Programming by an unnecessary week;I've been working on it for 43 years and I have 20 more years of workto do, and who knows what illnesses and other tragedies are in store.Every week is precious, especially when it seems to me that thereis no valid validation reason for a competent computer system personto be so fascistic. For all I know, you'll be making me spendanother week on this next year, and another the year after that.So, my former friends, please tell me either (i) when you aregoing to fix the problem, or (ii) who is your boss so that Ican complain at a higher level.Excuse me, that was a bit flamey wasn't it, and certainly egocentric.But I think you understand why I might be upset.Sincerely, Don Knuth