intertwingly

Jacques Distler: Introducing my very own Physics-oriented “river of news”: Planet Musings. If you’d rather view it in your feedreader, there’s an atom feed, too

I like environments where contributions are cumulative.  The Universal Feed Parser does a fair amount of data cleansing.  BeautifulSoup does quite a bit more.  All I had left to do was solve the “last mile” problem.  And Planet pulls it all together nicely.

My contributions have also been cumulative in that they have been eagerly adopted by the authors of the relevant code-bases.

On a related note, I’m pleased to see that Mark Pilgrim is considering Ubuntu.  I’m confident that his contributions to that community will also be cumulative — whether it be bug reports. documentation, or code.  Mark attributes his switching to a desire for Freedom.  Freedom is clearly important, but I don’t believe that it is the whole story.

From a W3C perspective Planet Musings is nearly valid.  The border attribute error is, in theory, solvable.  The alt attributes need to be added at the source.

But compliance with the relevant W3C specifications doesn’t tell the whole story.  From a user perspective, there are a number of errors - strange ampersands, hash signs, numbers, and semicolons.  The root cause for this can be traced to a product that is nominally “Free”, but the contributions that numerous have tried to make have not worked out to be cumulative.