HOWTO Spot a Wannabe Web Standards Advocate

If there is a match, you have spotted a wannabe.

• Talks about the importance of the alt tag.
• Claims <b> and <i> are deprecated.
• And spells it “depreciated”.
• Uses <span style="font-style: italic;">, because <i> is presentational.
• Wants software to use <em> and <strong> when the UI says italic and bold.
• Marks up quoted text as <cite>.
• Complains about upper-case tags in HTML.
• Claims XHTML 1.0 is more semantic than HTML 4.01.
• Claims XHTML 1.0 is more structured than HTML 4.01.
• Claims XHTML 1.0 is less presentational than HTML 4.01.
• Claims browsers parse XHTML served as text/html faster than they parse HTML.
• Refers to “the benefits of XHTML” without specifying what the benefits are.
• Uses large XHTML 1.0 Transitional documents with table layouts while claiming enhanced compatibility with handheld devices thanks to XHTML.
• “Future proofs” a site by migrating from HTML 4.01 Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Transitional and keeps serving it as text/html with all the old JavaScript scripts in place.
• Uses the XML empty element notation on pages that are supposed to be HTML pages.
• Complains about doctypeless application/xhtml+xml or SVG documents and smugly points to validator.w3.org.
• Claims all tables are evil.
• Advocates pixel-based absolute CSS positioning as the righteous replacement for evil tables.
• Changes //EN at the end of the public identifier in the doctype to the language code of the language the page is written in.
• Omits the namespace declaration in XHTML or SVG and claims it is OK, because it validates.
• Serves documents written using a home-grown XML vocabulary along with an XSLT transformation to HTML to browsers instead of serving HTML, because XML is more semantic.