I Hate Web Coders

So I've been sitting here for the better part of four hours trying to make a particular bookmark management application validate against w3's document validator. The final word? The main view of the application went from having 450 VALIDATION ERRORS to one. I plan on squashing that last one eventually, but not until it's the only error left on any of the views.

Here's where the question comes in, though ... XHTML, HTML, XML, whateverthefuckML ... they are all REALLY well-documented. How hard can it possibly be to adhere to standards? It can't be too difficult, considering that the changes that I made did absolutely NOTHING to alter the appearance or functionality of the package. Don't think that I'm really familiar with the way that the package is put together, either. I just started screwing around with this a day or two ago, and haven't really put that much effort into it.

Not much effort. That's what it took to make the generated markup for the MAIN VIEW of the application, the part that everybody sees the first (and most subsequent) time(s) that they view the site, valid. This is the sort of lethargy that's putting a lot of FOSS projects to pasture. Sure, there are the successful projects (which need not be mentioned here), but for every one of those, there are hundreds of shitty lumps. A lot of that shititude (yay for made up words) comes from stupid ideas, but a lot of it also comes from crap like this.

So, some advice for free/open (web) software authors:

• If there's a standard, follow it. If there's not, create one, then follow it.
• If you're going to use a templating engine of any sort, use it in the manner that it was meant to be used ... write your templates, and keep your fucking code out of them. They use variable interpolation for a reason, you know.
• Finally, BELITTLE THOSE THAT DON'T FOLLOW AWESOME ADVICE LIKE THIS. That might be the most important part. If you're an author of a project like the one that I've been talking about, you should feel fucking ashamed. Where's the pride that you're supposed to be pouring into your work/hobby? "But it works" is no excuse for being lazy, ignorant, or illiterate.