Blogging for Blog's Sake

by Mike Shea on 31 December 2002

One of the things I find interesting about blogs is how much time is spent talking about blogs, formatting blogs, symantic blogs, and structured blogs. The amount of time being spent talking about the theory behind content instead of content itself seems overly large. Lets look at some examples:

Mark Pilgrim of Dive into Mark:

I am amazed, bordering on appalled, at the attention garnered by my use of the cite tag. It is admittedly a clever little hack, but #2 on Daypop? This is the epitome of a slow news day. Aren't we all supposed to wile away our Fridays on pointless quizzes and Flash games? I know I do.

This guy is of the opinion that HTML is a far underutilized language for document structure and most of us are just too dumb to figure it out. For example he uses cite as an element tag and an attribute of a blockquote that holds a URL.

I believe a lot of what he says is spot-on. I think the majority of web publishers haven't a clue how to properly format their content using HTML the right way. If they did, the web would be a much more friendly place.

The irony comes from the fact that people seem to write about writing more than they write about something else. Yes, even this post is just as ironic as everyone elses.

I replaced br tags with div class="item" in my newsfeeds to make them more symantic. It should help with parsing, should someone wish to parse them, and makes them a little more standards compliant.

To talk about something other than stupid bullshit web stuff, Halo is an excellent game. I think I am almost finished, but some of the longer checkpoints are getting frustrating. I take out two tanks, two cloaked aliens, four mutant "floods", a score of smaller alien infantry, and two alien hunters and when I get killed on the last alien leutenant, I have to start all over again. Still, it's an excellent game. Hopefully Xbox gets Halo 2 with HDTV and DD 5.1.