Microsoft has a reason to be jittery

AS I POINTED in my 100th post in the other blog, I have been a Windows user since computing hooked me as a college student and a greenhorn government worker.

But last Saturday, I finally got to handle a PC running on KDE, a UNIX/Linux variant, in the internet cafe of my niece in Pili. At first I was disoriented with the logic of the whole setup--the way I was disoriented with the 'new' Filipino that Irvin blogs about courageously, I think. But in the end, I managed to complete the task I set out to do, which involved

1. Locating the flash drive which the PC recognized seamlessly;
2. Finding and opening the text and image files associated with that post; and
3. Uploading them into Blogger Beta using the really intuitive and intelligent Mozilla Firefox.

I haven't even touched Ubuntu, to which Chin Wong, Master Jessie and Dune Padre swears by; but to which Joel, my niece's hubby, will definitely not agree.

But it was a vastly different Linux I saw and ran for a brief moment last Saturday, lightyears ahead of its incarnation in early 2000 that was no longer text-based (as in MS-DOS), but certainly not very user-friendly. Its graphical user interface (GUI) is almost Apple-like but has a distinctive feel and look that Microsoft users cannot sneeze at. And as Joel said, not prone to viruses, worms, malwares and other security hazards that have become synonymous with Windows.

And most important of all, open-source and BSA-immune: the bottomline for the individual computing enthusiast who does not have the financial muscle that corporates have.

Now I really believe Microsoft has a reason to be truly jittery.

This is going to take a lot of time

VALIDATION, I mean.

The other day, I asked Master Jessie, EDP's resident webmaster who runs a very restrained blog that forms part of the Planet Naga aggregation as to why validation is necessary.

He said a validated site means it conforms to programming standards. It is also most probably the reason why my other blog--and by extension this one--does not render well in Internet Explorer, which I complained about in a previous post.

Which means this test blog will be here for a longer haul, owing to a raison d'etre whose breadth and depth has just grown many times over.

The reason behind validation

BY THE WAY, here is the reason advanced by the W3 Consortium on why validation is necessary:

One of the important maxims of computer programming is: Be conservative in what you produce; be liberal in what you accept.

Browsers follow the second half of this maxim by accepting Web pages and trying to display them even if they're not legal HTML. Usually this means that the browser will try to make educated guesses about what you probably meant. The problem is that different browsers (or even different versions of the same browser) will make different guesses about the same illegal construct; worse, if your HTML is really pathological, the browser could get hopelessly confused and produce a mangled mess, or even crash.

That's why you want to follow the first half of the maxim by making sure your pages are legal HTML. The best way to do that is by running your documents through one or more HTML validators.

A lengthier explanation is available here.

Now, is it worth all the pain and the effort? You tell me.