When old good practices become bad

There are some people with whom you just can’t disagree in their domains of expertise.

These people are always precise and accurate and when you read what one of them writes, you have a feeling that each of his words have been carefully pondered and is just the most accurate that could have been chosen.

In XML land, names that come to mind in that category are (to name few) James Clark, Rick Jelliffe, Murata Makoto, Jeni Tennison, David Carlisle, Uche Ogbuji and, of course, Michael Kay.

It is very exceptional that one can disagree with Michael Kay, his books appear to be 100% bullet proof and it can seem unbelievable that Joris Gillis could dare to write on the xsl-list:

You nearly gave me a heart attack when I encountered the following code in your – in all other aspects excellent – XSLT 2.0 book (3rd edition):…/…

You’ll have guessed that the reason why this happened is that the complain was not related to XSLT skills and the code that followed is:

<xsl:variable name="table-heading">
        <tr>
                <td><b>Date</b></td>
                <td><b>Home Team</b></td>
                <td><b>Away Team</b></td>
                <td><b>Result</b></td>
        </tr>
</xsl:variable>

Michael Kay apologized:

I think it’s true to say that practices like this were commonplace five years ago when many of these examples were written – they are still commonplace today, but no longer regarded as good practice.

And the thread ended up as a discussion about common sense and good practices:

« Common sense » is after all by definition what the majority of people think at the time – it was common sense back then to use tables, it’s common sense now to avoid them…

This thinking itself is also common sense but still good food for thought: good practices of yesterday become poor practices and it’s always worth reconsidering our practices.

When I saw Derrick Story’s announcement of O’Reilly Network Homepage beta, I was quite sure that the publisher of Eric Meyer would have taken the opportunity to follow today’s good practices…

Guess what? The W3C HTML validator reports 40 errors on that page and I can’t disagree with that comment posted on their site:

Well. […] 2 different sites to allow for cookies, redirects that went nowhere and all I really wanted to say was « IT’S A TABLE-BASED LAYOUT! ». Good grief.