Mark is angry. How angry?

I migrated to semantic markup that has been around for 10 fucking years and they go and drop it. Not deprecate it slowly over time, mind you, but just fucking drop it. Which means that, after keeping up with all the latest standards, painstakingly marking up all my content, and validating every last page on my site, I’m still stuck in a dead end.
[…]
Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant.

I’m migrating to HTML 4.

Refreshingly sincere isn’t it? I can understand him: it seems the XHTML he lovingly crafted will be made obsolete. (or will it? I don’t know, I have issues with the basics of CSS that need to be resolved… Look at this site… so I’m not going to get into discussions on XHTML)

Standards evolve and conflict. Generally, I can understand the need to do tabula rasa once in a while. I cringe when it happens with laws though, because a well known evil is often easier to deal with than that weird new thing, no matter how much good will went into drafting it.Yet, for things as mark-up languages, maybe standardization bodies should be allowed to fumble and change their mind.

I’m saying that because it seems like a relatively new field and an absolutely rapidly evolving one too and I imagine it is harder to envision all the consequences of a single decision. I’d be curious to learn about the rationale of the changes Mark talks about though.

So Mark followed the book to the letter, pure code, and got burned. At least he proved it could be done. That’s an impressive feat in itself.

Will Mark be as passionate about HTML 4 as he was with the much richer (philosophically speaking) XHTML? And more importantly, what’s with the need to use the latest, highest numbered, standard? Early adoption is great, but his code is still valid as it is isn’t it? Is it about lost bragging rights? Frustration of misdirected efforts?