This is an oldie but a goodie from the dusty and dank archives of the internet (of 1997 vintage). David Siegel, the self-proclaimed ‘HTML Terrorist’ and brutal violator/ravisher of all “pure” coding, owns up to the serious charge of ruining the web. However, he defends his actions admirably, by looking far into the future and predicting that rule-breakers will in essence one day, rule the web.
Snip from the article:
Some people say I’ve ruined the Web, and to them it’s true. Web pages can’t be seen as easily by search engines and those with low-end machines have a hard time getting much out of my site. On my personal site, I don’t even put ALT tags just to send a message to those surfing without images. My life is visual. I love museums. How would you like to visit the Louvre with images turned off?
I ruined the Web by mixing chocolate and peanut butter so they could never become unmixed. I committed the hangable offense of mixing structure with presentation, and in HTML and SGML circles, that’s a big no-no. The reason the HTML purists never carried out their threats is not that they’re against violence, it’s that they know that if they kill me, someone else will rise to take my place. It seems that structure and presentation have been mixed forever, and the Web is in the fast lane of the road to Hell. Fortunately, nothing on the Web is what it seems, and “forever” lasts only about six months.
Link to the article.