… In your dreams! Google seems to maintain an attitude of Olympic disdain to standards. While we are all busy booing Microsoft for their trademarked Embrace&Extinguish move, Google can and does get off with just a collective pat on the back. I understand —and share— the Google fascination, as I understood —and shared, much to my current chagrin— the Microsoft fascination that was prevalent on the nineties. But ‘standards are good’ is as powerful a meme as it can be, and moreover, it’s actually true.

If Google bit the bullet and implemented the rather meager changes needed to make possible actual XHTML compliance into Blogger’s template engine, very few bloggers would take the task of ensuring their pages’ validity upon themselves. A wasted effort? Let’s have a look from the other side: I feel I’m denied a freedom when I can’t comply, no matter how hard I try, with a standard I consider as a basic building block of the Semantic Web (some call this Web 3.0, but given the current state of affairs, it might well be called Web Millenium Edition or, even worse, Web Vista).

I am not alone. I want my blog, unimportant as it might be, readable by people and machines alike; and not just by smart ones like Google employees and Googlebots. I want maximum accesibility without having to cast undocumented incantations (versus W3C documented ones, I mean). I know standards are pointless, difficult and boring, and Google is all about instant gratification, do-what-I-mean interfaces and having fun. I know standards are for nerds. Unattractive, glamour-less nerds. Please, let me try.