Future self and I

tags in people’s HTML documents and god forbid – PEOPLE WERE USING TABLES INSTEAD OF CSS! For years they met underground, plotting and scheming.

Their first assault on the world was Firefox. A small web browser based on Mozilla. It forced people to look at compliant-only web pages, and encouraged its users to bitch and whinge to site developers and maintainers that “this box is 2cm out of place” and “Your banner is 17px too wide”. They removed support for the most basic of tags that have existed since the beginning of time (such as the ‘background=’ tag). They developed pro-firefox web pages (Browse Happy, anyone?) that over a few years gained support, much like a pro-nazi group. Eventually site developers got fucking pissed off. If a site looked good in every browser on earth, it looked shit in Firefox. If it looked good in firefox it looked shit in every other browser and took 2138x as long to code. They tried to please everyone but couldn’t! The standards police were starting to get their nails in deep! For years this continued, with each release of Firefox they removed more support for every day tags until most HTML documents were EMPTY and people started rasterising their pages into JPG’s – Then they removed JPGs and only supported PNG’s.

Things went down hill from there. Developers were deliberatley making non-firefox pages and the firefoxing standards police in their single mindedness did not see the other side of the picture and started further assaults, even suing large companies for non making firefox compliant pages.

The war “officially” started (I say that in “” as I believe it has already started) when one pissed off developer got a phone call from an irate firefox user who couldn’t see the pretty background colour in a navigation bar because it was embedded in the HTML and not the CSS. The developer traced the caller and went around to his house and promptly put a bullett in his head. It was then normal users and developers facing a fanatic standards police, who after all this time of meeting underground were all wild-eyed and pale skinned. After their small success in having a special firefox-only google page they felt that they were invulnerable. Hundreds of people were killed as pissed off developers attacked firefox junkies with discarded and sharpened AOL CD’s.

The war only lasted for three months. After then all the firefox junkies were dead, and those that still secretly followed their cause did so in quiet. They stopped their whining and went back to life as usual. They realised that “HEY! It actually DOES NOT MATTER that I want to look at websites in their full prettiness, I can do so using a normal browser and my penis WON’T fall off!”. The world then realised the true meaning of Browse Happy – the ability to browse the internet without standards police fucking you in the ass and shooting fire out of their penis’s and burning your prostate. The Browse Happy site was then replaced with pictures of naked women.

So, watch out! Now that we know it’s going to happen we can AVOID it! This war NEVER need escalate! And I would very much love to thank my great-great grandson for letting me know, but he forgot that we still have non-shock absorbing cars and he forgot to look left, then right, then look left again and listen and he’s now being peeled off Ryde Road as we speak.