I’ve made no secret about the fact that I’m a big fan of LibraryThing. I’ve spent hours and hours tweaking my LibraryThing profile, adding books to my catalog, and just browsing around other people’s shelves. I’ve spoken with Tim Spalding, LibraryThing’s founder, and he’s taken the time to respond to e-mails of mine and feature me on the LibraryThing blog once or twice.

So I felt a little like a cheating spouse when I responded to someone’s invitation to sign up for a Shelfari account last week. But it was actually much easier than cheating on a spouse, because I didn’t have to go through that whole tedious seduction and getting-to-know-you routine. I exported my whole LibraryThing catalog in about three clicks, and imported it right into Shelfari. In a way, it was like moving in with your mistress and skipping straight to the seven-year-itch all in one shot.

Here are screen captures of my catalog on LibraryThing and Shelfari, side by side. (Visit my shelf on Shelfari.)

After noodling around with Shelfari a little bit, here’s a synopsis of my thought process:

1. The name “Shelfari” is incredibly lame.
2. Shelfari looks slicker than LibraryThing.
3. Shelfari is more user-friendly than LibraryThing.
4. LibraryThing is fairly slick and user-friendly in the first place.
5. So why would I switch to Shelfari?

The big difference between LibraryThing and Shelfari is that LibraryThing caps its free accounts at 200 books; Shelfari doesn’t appear to have any limits. But keep in mind that the LibraryThing rates are eminently reasonable. $10 a year for all you can catalog, or $25 for a lifetime membership.

Oh yeah, and Shelfari has a Facebook application. (I see that LibraryThing is testing out MySpace and LiveJournal widgets, which is cool, but IMHO they need to get cranking on a Facebook app.)

But there’s a huge amount of functionality that LT has which Shelfari doesn’t seem to have. I went browsing through “my shelf” on Shelfari and discovered that my copy of Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends doesn’t have Silverstein listed as the author, only as the illustrator; and despite the fact that there’s an “Edit” link next to Edition Details, there doesn’t seem to be any way to edit that information. I was able to change editions to one which does have the author listed… but this one doesn’t have an illustrator listed. LT, by contrast, lets you edit book details to your heart’s content and upload custom covers that the whole community can use. Does the system think that “J.D. Salinger” and “JD Salinger” are two different people? Easy enough to fix that in LibraryThing.

This community focus is one of the things that makes LibraryThing so appealing. It’s kind of like — well, a library. It’s really, really easy to import and export your entire catalog so you can use it in other applications. Put it on your blog? Tie it in to your Firefox? Access it from your cell phone? No problem! If there are inaccuracies in the catalog, everybody pitches in to help fix it. If you read through the help menus and fine print, you’ll see quirky little bits of humor that give the site some attitude. “If the buzz page doesn’t convince you,” says a little blurb on the LibraryThing home page, “you cannot be convinced. Go away.” There’s a lack of commercial focus that’s very reminiscent of that library feeling. Come on in! Put your feet up, hang around as long as you like, buy some of the books on the Community Used Book table in the back if you’d like, but no pressure.

Of course, there are downsides to the public library. LibraryThing seems to go down more often than most other Web 2.0 sites I’ve seen (except for the chronically hapless MySpace). It’s not uncommon to find bugs and layout quirks. Every once in a while, you’ll find something not working with a cheerful little “we’re working to fix things” message. Oops, the plumbing’s leaking over in the corner again! Don’t worry, we’ve called the guy to fix it, he should be here in the next hour or two. Just try to steer clear of it in the meantime, ‘mkay?

Shelfari, by contrast, feels more like a corporate-owned bookstore. Like something a bunch of guys from Microsoft and RealNetworks would put together and then get funding from Amazon for. And if you poke around in the About Us sections of Shelfari for a few minutes, you’ll see that that’s exactly the case. If you’re wondering why Cory Doctorow breaks into hives whenever you say the word “Shelfari”, it’s because the president and co-founder of the company was in charge of DRM for RealNetworks. (Read Shelfari’s Management page.)

Poking around in the About Us sections of Shelfari reveals that these folks expect to sustain this site through Amazon referral fees, which seems pretty unrealistic to me. If you dig around the LibraryThing site, you’ll see several ironic references to the wads and wads of cash they pull in from Amazon referral fees. Meaning “we don’t expect to set the NASDAQ ablaze with this kind of revenue stream.” True, LibraryThing doesn’t exactly push people to buy books off of Amazon — they cheerfully funnel people to any number of sites, including book swapping sites like BookMooch and ReadItSwapIt — but they’ve got a much larger user base than Shelfari at the moment. Shelfari claims that they’re not going to accept advertising either.

So let’s do the math here: no membership fees + no advertising revenue + minuscule referral fee income – hosting fees, bandwidth fees, programming costs, overhead and salaries = remind me again how you intend to stay afloat after the Amazon money dries up?

For the moment it’s pretty clear which service gets my vote as the more functional, useful, and friendly place to be. Luckily, there’s no reason why I can’t maintain accounts on both for the moment. It’ll be interesting to see how Shelfari grows and develops over time.

The common assumption among programming types about MySpace is that the system started off as somebody’s pet project and quickly mushroomed beyond the programmers’ control. Rather than cooling off growth to create a better infrastructure, the MySpace folks opted for growth at any costs. As a result, we end up with the buggy, unreliable usability nightmare that is MySpace today. Now, it’s assumed, the programmers and sysadmins are scrambling to play catchup.

This article pretty much confirms these assumptions. According to the article, MySpace started out as a ColdFusion-based project — and while ColdFusion is ridiculously easy to program, any developer can tell you it’s got a reputation (deserved or not) for being a little slow and resource-heavy on the performance scale. So as they’ve grown, MySpace has been moving to Microsoft’s ASP.Net and relying on emulators to port some of the older code over.

One can’t really blame MySpace for such logic. It’s the kind of hot-air logic that propelled companies like Pets.com to the stratosphere back in the ’90s and made a ton of people oodles and oodles of cash. It’s Web 1.0 thinking. Using such Web 1.0 thinking, MySpace has quickly vaulted to become the most visited site on the Internet and gotten snatched up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in the process.

But as a result, they’ve built on an unsustainable foundation. They’ve made the classic gamble that short-term gain will trump long-term stability. And like so many Web 1.0 companies that came before them, MySpace is headed for a big, clumsy fall. Here’s why.

• Easy come, easy go. The base audience for MySpace consists of teenagers and folks in their twenties. That’s not to say this is the only demographic using MySpace, but that’s the core audience. These people flocked to the service for the same reasons young people flock to anything: it was new, it was cool, it was free, and everyone they knew was doing it. Give them an alternative that’s newer, cooler, better functioning, and more reliable — not to mention backed by big corporate dollars — and they’ll flock there just as quickly.
• Insecurity. Recently someone came up with the grand idea of distributing malicious code through a security vulnerability in embedded QuickTime videos. Folks have been taking advantage of CSS and HTML quirks to hack MySpace almost since the place began. More and more people are complaining about hacked profiles and hijacked identities. MySpace has demonstrated time and again that they’re behind the curve when it comes to security. So I think it’s highly likely that at some point in the near future, we’ll see a series of successful crippling attacks on MySpace that will send people running in a panicky exodus.
• Slowing pace of innovation. Adapt or die, that’s the unofficial motto of the Internet. And unlike, say, Google, which continues to pump out features and applications by the gallon, MySpace has remained largely sedentary for the past year. They released a lamentable, old-school IM client and better video integration, but otherwise the system is pretty much the same as it was 18 months ago. As MySpace’s technical problems grow and their folks spend more and more time just keeping up with demand, they’re going to fall even further behind.
• Facebook. If you want to see an example of a MySpace-like program that actually works, look no further than Facebook. It’s user-friendly, it’s popular, and best of all, it’s reliable. The service’s big handicap at this point is that it doesn’t allow nearly the level of customization that MySpace does. But that’s only one major partnership with Yahoo! away (assuming Yahoo! finally bites the bullet and makes a deal with them already).
• Where are the premium services? I’m not entirely familiar with the intricacies of MySpace’s business model, but from the looks of things, they’re entirely dependent on advertising. And as Yahoo! has discovered, that’s not a stable strategy for the long term. Why hasn’t MySpace tapped into the burgeoning third-party market of MySpace website pimpers and added services like that of their own? Where are the premium clubs and the premium band promotion services?
• “Why change?” attitude. A former MySpace VP of operations is quoted in the article as saying: “when you look at the result, it’s hard to argue that what we did with the interface and navigation was bad. And why change it, when you have success?” Few technology companies have succeeded in the long run with the mantra “why change?” It won’t fly on the Internet, where the barriers to migrating to another free service are absolutely nil.

So there you have a few reasons off the top of my head why I think MySpace is headed for a fall. This doesn’t mean that they’ll disappear entirely. After all, Compuserve is still around, and America Online will probably hang on for awhile too even after they’ve recklessly thrown away their customers. But neither are any more than a shell of their former selves, and I suspect that MySpace will eventually meet that fate too.

Is it inevitable? Well, every Goliath falls eventually. That’s just the nature of the universe. But it’s up to MySpace just how far away and how graceful that fall is.

—

(Related reading: see my previous rants on Why Does MySpace Suck So Badly? and MySpace Spam or Clever Marketing?)

Forget the fact that “coComment” has to be one of the worst names for a technology I’ve ever heard. The concept is a good one, and it’s simple. coComment keeps track of all the comments you make on blogs throughout the web so you don’t have to go Googling for them yourself.

It’s a nice potential solution to a couple of perennial problems in the blogosphere:

1. The “did anyone reply to my comment” problem. You read an article on someone’s blog that gets you riled up/steamed/aroused/amused/encouraged/etc. It’s late at night and you’re just about to go to bed, but you decide to throw in your two cents to the discussion. The next morning dawns and you forget all about it. Six months later, you stumble across your comment during a bit of vanity Googling and discover that twenty-seven people had a long and contentious debate about your two cents, but you weren’t around to contribute.

2. The “I want to read that guy’s comments” problem. You happen upon a really insightful comment by a familiar name. Perhaps it’s a famous author. Perhaps it’s a friend of yours. Perhaps it’s just someone whose opinion you trust. And you think, how many times has this guy dispensed his particular brand of wisdom in the blogosphere without me knowing about it? How can I follow this person’s opinions without wading through a hundred pages of Google results?

Now you can solve both of these problems with a free coComment account. If you’re using Firefox, coComment installs an extension that will do all of the heavy lifting for you. (Non-Firefox users can use a JavaScript bookmarklet.) The extension sticks a relatively unobtrusive extra bar in the comments box on almost any blog. Just type in your comment, make sure the “tracking conversation” box is checked, and coComment will keep track of that thread from now on.

And… that’s it. No reason to go back to the same page and hit the “reload” button to see if anyone’s replied to your comment. Just click the button in the status bar, and you’ll get a page listing all of the threads you’ve commented on. (See sample screen shot above.) Items in bold face have new, unread comments. All others don’t.

(Keep in mind that there’s nothing stopping you from tracking conversations you’re not participating in. Just open that comment form, click the checkbox, and the tracking begins — whether you’ve submitted a comment or not.)

(Also, there’s no reason you can’t uncheck the track conversations box, to prevent your comments list from getting clogged with lots of random one-word remarks you made at the spur of the moment.)

So how do you share your comments with others? Well, that’s where coComment falls down a little bit. It’d be nice if you could simply link to an HTML page on the coComment website that lets anyone view your comments. Instead, coComment gives you RSS feeds. It’s a nice feature, but not particularly useful for the less technically inclined. (Check out my coComment RSS feed.) If you know what you’re doing, it’s not that difficult to take these RSS feeds and make a little sidebar widget for your WordPress or Movable Type blog that will display all your recent comments around the blogosphere.

Of course, like any new technology, coComment is a little rough around the edges. It seems to work seamlessly with most blog systems like Blogger, WordPress, and LiveJournal. But about 20% of the time, you’re confronted with a little form that asks you to plug in URLs and descriptions for the blog you’re viewing. Needless to say, switching back and forth between browser tabs to cut-and-paste URLs is not my idea of a good time. The site provides easy-to-follow instructions for webmasters to make their blogs “coComment-friendly.” But I’ll wager that this thing won’t hit the big time until coComment irons out all these kinks without webmaster intervention.

The website itself also doesn’t give you any options for changing or customizing a comment thread once you’ve added it to the queue. For some reason, all of the comments for this blog are on my coComments list as “Limits on Speed, Limits on Freedom (David Louis Edelman’s Blog)” — which is the title for one particular article I wrote months ago. I’d like to go back and customize some of these titles — or at least take advantage of the feature that allows you to add multiple tags to your comments to better organize them. But as far as I can tell, coComment won’t let you do it.

Still, minor grumbling aside, it’s a great idea and a great implementation. So why not give it a spin and have your comment on my blog be your first with coComment?

StumbleUpon installs a toolbar in your browser that allows you to give instant thumbs-up or thumbs-down ratings for the websites you’re viewing. You can also tag them, comment on them, and recommend them to others. Click on a button while you’re browsing and you’ll find a page of user reviews for the site you’re on.

A year ago, I might have been really excited about this. StumbleUpon seems like a perfectly nice and well-implemented service. Instead, I’m suddenly feeling jaded. There’s just too much web 2.0 gimmickry around and I’m starting to get that bursting-bubble feeling.

I have a Reddit account. I regularly use Technorati. I run a WordPress blog with plenty of plug-ins to allow cross-posting, related posting, and comment previewing. I have a Firefox extension called coComment that allows me to track any blog conversation I want. I maintain a MySpace page, a LinkedIn profile, a LiveJournal, and an Amazon blog. My library is on LibraryThing. I sync my browser settings with Google BrowserSync, read e-mail on both GMail and Yahoo!, and read the news on customizable Google News pages. I read RSS feeds in Sage, Bloglines, and IE7. I have instant messaging accounts on Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Google Talk, along with a Trillian client to run them all.

Where does it all end? I could sign up for Digg and del.icio.us and Blogger and Friendster and…

Every single one of these services has a few things in common: they’re all meta information tools. They don’t actually, you know, do much of anything. They’re the Wonder bread that’s supposed to be sandwiching the meat of my online experience. They simply allow me to noodle around with my information in interesting and novel ways, to disseminate it far and wide, to share it and crunch it and squeeze it and caress it. Or they point me to other information that someone else has shared, crunched, etc.

But here’s something else that I’ve noticed: all of their revenue streams are somewhat suspect. Google, Yahoo, and MySpace might have big market capitalizations and lots of dough in the bank, but in the end they’re funded mostly by advertising. Many of these other services are even a step removed from that, and depend on Google’s advertising.

What’s wrong with advertising? Nothing. Except that me and hundreds of thousands of others run ad blocking software (I choose the AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox along with Filterset.G) that wipes all of those ads off the screen without a trace. Except that there are morons who perpetrate click fraud on their competitors’ search engine ads with no remorse and (generally) no repercussions. Except that for all of this money that keyword-targeted advertising is supposedly making for so many people, I very rarely actually click on any of it.

Many of these companies have other services that they’re trying to charge money for, but I don’t know how much success they’re having. Google and Yahoo have a whole host of additional services ripe for premium, paying versions, but I don’t think any of them are actually setting the world on fire. StumbleUpon, quite amusingly, tries to convince me to buy “accelerated distribution” of my website whenever I click on a StumbleUpon referring link in my web stats package. But are people buying?

So we’ve got a) four zillion start-ups that b) don’t charge a penny for their services, and c) stay afloat through shaky advertising revenue. Sound familiar?

Now, don’t get me wrong — I like a lot of these services. I’ve blogged before about my adoration for LibraryThing, for instance. I’ve found many an interesting (or at least diverting) website through Digg and Reddit. And StumbleUpon seems like a perfectly good idea, executed in a perfectly good way, available from a perfectly good website. (Let’s also keep in mind that I’m being unfair by lumping an open source project like WordPress in with the rest of these for-profit companies.)

And of course, none of these companies (with the possible exception of Google) indulges in the kinds of gross financial negligence that the dot-coms of the ’90s did. I’m sure the guys who run Digg are doing very nicely for themselves, but I doubt that every lowly coder in the place is getting a six-figure signing bonus and company BMW. I’ve talked with Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing, in the past, and while their membership is growing like crazy, Tim hasn’t exactly started shellacking bundles of money and using them as office furniture.

And yet…

I’m starting to get that same feeling all over again. You know, the feeling you got when that twenty-pound bag of dog food from Pets.com arrived on your doorstep in 1998 for some ridiculously low price with free shipping, and you looked at your spouse and said, “This is just too good to be true.”

It was. And maybe, just maybe, it still is.

MySpace is far and away the most popular of these types of services. According to Alexa, MySpace ranks only below Yahoo and Google in terms of popularity on the web. If you’re curious, you can view my page at http://www.myspace.com/davidlouisedelman.

Here’s the problem: MySpace is an abomination. Nothing works. The things that do work are poorly designed and shoddily implemented. Here’s just a small sampling of problems I’ve been having:

• Member search doesn’t work. Try searching for members using multiple criteria, and watch the search go splat. (Then again, Yahoo’s member search has been broken for years and nobody seems eager to fix it.)
• Importing contacts doesn’t work. I tried importing my online address books from Yahoo, GMail, and AIM. MySpace said it sent out a dozen or so invites. It didn’t, and I had to redo the whole thing by hand.
• Instant messaging doesn’t didn’t work. I tried sending a friend a message just to see what it would do, only to receive a very unprofessional-looking error message stating that the instant messaging was out of commission.
• Cross-posting from WordPress doesn’t work. I have managed to get this working with LiveJournal (http://david-l-edelman.livejournal.com if you’re curious) using a nice little plugin I found on the web. There used to be one of these for MySpace, but the plugin developer gave up because MySpace kept mucking with the API.
• Reporting spam doesn’t work. This morning I received friend requests from kinkymonica, flirtymonica, and luvymonica. How do you report these friend requests as the porn spam they so obviously are? You can’t.
• Approving your friends doesn’t work. I’m currently staring at my “approve/deny your friends” queue, which states that I’m looking at “Listing 1-6 of 6.” Only about an inch away, however, there’s another column that says “1 of 1.” And below, there’s nothing listed. Do I have five phantom friends? (Actually, that would explain a lot of things…)

To add to the functional problems, the site is full of the worst kind of design heresy. Boxes float around the page with seemingly no rhyme or reason. The default icons look like rejects from your old Windows 3.1 installation. Navigation seems to float around the screen in illogical places, to the point where the only button I can rely on is the browser’s Back button. Things get even worse when users start mucking with their MySpace designs and adding polls and plug-ins and garish animated GIFs. You get stuck with endless pages that take forever to load and are impossible to read.

The worst sin of all is that MySpace plays multimedia files without asking you first. My first reaction to any page that starts blaring music or video at me is to immediately click the Back button and run like hell. In order to turn off the music at MySpace, you need to quickly scan the screen for the multimedia player — which is in a different place on each page — and click the Stop or Pause button. But even then, your preference doesn’t stick, so if you go to a different site and come back later, the music starts blaring again. (Only this time it starts playing faster because the page is in your browser cache.)

Recently MySpace attempted to ameliorate this by adding a preference you can set to turn off the automatic music. Surprise: it doesn’t always work.

The question that I have is that why hasn’t MySpace made full use of open standards, the most successful example of social networking on the web to date? Take a look at the source code for your MySpace page, and it’s a mess. No DTD at the top, style sheet links embedded in the middle of the body, tables mixed with DIVs mixed with IFRAMEs willy-nilly.

And I’m not just talking about open standards determined by some committee in Switzerland, but web design standards that have won the long, hard Darwinian slog in the marketplace. Navigational sidebars. Underlined links. Fluid layouts that don’t break on different screen resolutions. Different colors for visited links.

The popularity of MySpace is enough for me to reevaluate all of the design credos I hold so dear. If such a horrible website as this can become a cultural phenomenon and literally change the way American teenagers live their lives, then what hope is there for web standards?

My only consolation is that the Firefox AdBlock extension works just fine on MySpace. Not only that, but Userscripts.org has a bevvy of useful Greasemonkey scripts to turn bad MySpace pages into — well, less bad MySpace pages.

So imagine my excitement when I discovered LibraryThing.

LibraryThing is basically a connected online database of your library. Search the database for books you own and add them to your digital library. Rate them, review them, tag them, comment on them, choose the cover and edition you own. See who else owns them, see what books other people who own them like. Track a user’s recent purchases or reviews with an RSS feed. (If you’re curious, you can view my profile or view my catalog.)

You might be thinking that Amazon already has some of these features. Yes it does, but that doesn’t make LibraryThing redundant. It seems to me that LibraryThing holds about the same relation to Amazon that a brick-and-mortar library holds to your local brick-and-mortar bookstore. Amazon tries to get you to pad your shopping cart at every turn by pointing out related items, add-ons, and discounts; LibraryThing is more concerned with building a book community where people with similar tastes can connect.

That doesn’t mean that LibraryThing is a non-profit. Clicking on book covers does take you to Amazon, and I presume that they get a cut of the sales in return. And the free cataloging of books only extends to the first 200 titles; to catalog an unlimited number of books, you need to pay $10 a year or $25 for a lifetime. LibraryThing just doesn’t shove the commercial upgrades in your face like Amazon does.

This lack of commercial pushiness may be LibraryThing’s best feature. As a result, the interface is clean, easy to navigate, and doesn’t clutter your browser with pop-up windows or ads.

You’re just left with… book-geekity fun. It’s like snooping through thousands of people’s libraries all at once.

The contents of a person’s library tells you a lot about the person herself. Does she own a lot of weighty contemporary literature? Escapist adventure novels? Tomes on politics and economics? A little of each? What would you do if you spotted Chapterhouse: Dune, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, and Clown Skits for Everyone sitting side by side on her shelves? (You could do what I did. Reader, I married her.)

More than that, the disposition of a person’s library tells you a lot about the character of the person herself. If you were to look at my library, for instance, you would see that many hardcovers are snugly encased in clear plastic Brodart covers, and there is nary a creased spine or a dogeared page to be found. I go out of my way to buy matched sets of books. You would conclude that I’m an anal retentive son of a bitch, and you’d be right.

I keep all my titles segregated by subject (science fiction, general fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc.) and alphabetized by author. Each author’s works are sorted chronologically, with the occasional exception for numbered series. (Though may God have mercy on your soul if you suggest to me that The Magician’s Nephew is the first book in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series instead of the sixth.)

LibraryThing lets book geeks like me fully engage their OCD tendencies, which is reason enough to buy in. Now I can sort, organize, catalog, and compare to my heart’s content in a safe online space.

Stop reading and go sign up already so I can start snooping in on your lives too.

(Update: Just before posting this, I discovered that LibraryThing actually plugged my book Infoquake on the official company blog, and listed me as one of 20 initial LibraryThing Authors. Thanks! Hope I can return the favor.)

Who gives a shit? you might be thinking to yourself. Wait, I’ll explain. This might actually change your life someday.

For years, people have been writing web pages using the dated and somewhat arbitrary HTML 4 specification. If you don’t know what HTML looks like, take a look at the source code on any web page (by going to the “View” menu and selecting “Page Source” in Firefox or “View Source” in IE).

The problem is that during the web browser wars of the ’90s, Microsoft and Netscape both decided that they wanted their browsers to be as inclusive as possible. You could be a sloppy or an amateur coder, make all kinds of errors in your HTML, and the browser would silently compensate for you. For instance, the proper way to create a bulleted list is by using this code:

<ul>
<li>apples</li>
<li>oranges</li>
<li>bananas</li>
</ul>

But you could just as easily get away with typing this instead:

<UL>
<Li>apples
<li>oranges<lI>
<li>bananas
</ul></Ul>

Now this sort of expansiveness worked really well when the Web was new and getting people to buy the entire concept was the name of the game. You didn’t need to be a programming geek to get your chicken tortilla soup recipe before the masses; all you needed was a half-hour tutorial in HTML and you were on your way.

But we’ve entered a new phase in the development of the Internet. Web 2.0 has arrived, to use the popular catchphrase. And though you’ll hear a lot about how social networking and sharing apps are what Web 2.0 is all about, the truth is that Web 2.0 is about machines talking to machines. I write this blog entry in WordPress blogging software, which talks to the MySQL database holding all the information; talks to Ping-o-Matic and tells it to alert various search engines; and talks to your feedreading client and tells it that I’ve written a new entry. Ta-da! Machines talking to machines.

So what’s the problem with sloppy HTML? Machines can’t understand it. Which means that Google (to take one example) has to use elaborate parsing algorithms in order to turn your website into something it can understand. And while it’s all very well and good for a mega-corporation like Google to build these fuzzy linguistic interpreters, the next guy who wants to market a simple web service in his basement doesn’t have that kind of luxury.

It also means that different browsers interpret your web pages differently, and therefore display things differently. If you use Internet Explorer and you come across an improperly coded XHTML page, the browser goes into “Quirks mode” (I swear I’m not making that up) and tries to figure out what the hell you’re trying to do. Many web programmers simply code for what looks good in Internet Explorer 6 on Windows — even if it’s “wrong” or “broken” code — and to hell with all the Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, Konqueror, Lynx and Flock users.

Enter XHTML.

XHTML is basically the HTML language, cleaned up. It’s HTML after six weeks of boot camp under a hard-ass drill sergeant. You have strict rules, and those rules must be obeyed. Take the bulleted list code above. In proper XHTML, you cannot capitalize any of the tags. You must close each tag so that for every opening <ul> there is a closing </ul>. You can’t put an <li> tag outside of a <ul> tag floating around on its own.

You can debate the merits of sending unruly teenagers to military school all you want, but for web pages there’s no debate. Strictly followed XHTML makes things easier for the machines that read your code. If we all followed the rules to the letter, Google would have a much easier time categorizing websites and it would save us all a lot of time.

Now here’s the problem: most web browsers process XHTML like normal HTML. They applaud your good manners and give you a gold star for coding correctly, but they’ll still slide right into Quirks mode when you make a mistake.

Until Mozilla Firefox. All you need to do to turn Firefox into an A-1 hard-ass drill sergeant is to (1) assign your web page the XHTML Strict DTD and (2) have your web server send the page to the browser as application/xhtml+xml instead of text/html. (You can look up how to do this elsewhere if you care. It’s basically just two lines of code.) Once you do this, Firefox will stop the display of your website cold if you’ve made any coding errors. Missed a closing <p> tag? Added an extra space? Accidentally capitalized a tag? Tough shit. Your page does not display, and you see a yellow XHTML Parsing Error instead.

(It’s important to understand that Firefox will only do this on a page-by-page basis, when that page and web server tell it to. If you don’t give Firefox these instructions, it will “fail gracefully” and display sloppily coded pages just like any other browser.)

This just might change the world.

Here’s how it might work: (1) Web programmers start migrating towards Strict XHTML. (2) Web services begin to interpret properly coded websites better than sloppily coded sites. (3) Web programmers flock to Strict XHTML in droves so their sites aren’t penalized. (4) The creators of these web services eventually decide to stop processing pages that are incorrectly coded altogether because it’s too much of a hassle. (5) The overhead for creating a useful web service goes down drastically. (6) Useful web services multiply exponentially. (7) You can search Google for “Northern Virginia Mexican restaurants,” and Google will no longer suggest that the “Pamela Andersen Britney Spears Katie Holmes Nude Sex Tits!!!” website might be the one you’re looking for.

And the world will be a better place.