Submission + - Grammar Know-it-all Don't Know Code
geekwithsoul writes: "Lynne Truss, author of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" and "Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today," often makes known her belief that anyone who misplaces a comma is contributing to "death of prose and poetry." With the success of her books, it was recently announced that she started up her own website to collect examples of bad punctuation and grammar, as well as toot her own horn about how bloody stupid everyone else is compared to her.
So why is this on Slashdot? Because, oh delicious irony of ironies, the HTML code on her site does not validate. Think about that for a second. This is a woman who makes her living saying there is an absolute right and wrong to punctuation and grammar in the English language, when in fact, there is no officially recognized document, work, or organization that determines what the rules of English are.
This same woman, when operating in the technical environment of the Internet and the web — which actually has official standards, puts up a website that not only does not validate against the ancient and creaky HTML 4.01 Transitional standard (as noted in the!DOCTYPE of her own pages), let alone newer XHMTL standards , it is using nested tables, JavaScript-based navigation, and other code that violates "rules" for coding and accessibility. Now, I don't expect that everyone will always code pristine and standard-perfect web pages. However, if you're going to put yourself out there as an arbiter of right and wrong in something as nebulous and ill-defined as the English language, shouldn't you be the type who should follow the official standards of punctuation, grammar, and syntax of other forms of expression such as web development?"
So why is this on Slashdot? Because, oh delicious irony of ironies, the HTML code on her site does not validate. Think about that for a second. This is a woman who makes her living saying there is an absolute right and wrong to punctuation and grammar in the English language, when in fact, there is no officially recognized document, work, or organization that determines what the rules of English are.
This same woman, when operating in the technical environment of the Internet and the web — which actually has official standards, puts up a website that not only does not validate against the ancient and creaky HTML 4.01 Transitional standard (as noted in the!DOCTYPE of her own pages), let alone newer XHMTL standards , it is using nested tables, JavaScript-based navigation, and other code that violates "rules" for coding and accessibility. Now, I don't expect that everyone will always code pristine and standard-perfect web pages. However, if you're going to put yourself out there as an arbiter of right and wrong in something as nebulous and ill-defined as the English language, shouldn't you be the type who should follow the official standards of punctuation, grammar, and syntax of other forms of expression such as web development?"
