If Don Knuth (remember, it’s like “Knopf” – pronounce the K!) wants to dash off pretentious complaints to the W3C Validator team, why can’t he send his own damned E-mail? Oh, I forgot: Don Knuth is important. So important that he can spend years using a nonstandard document-type declaration in incompatible ways, yet feel he has the right to bitch.
Listen, Don, Computer Modern completely bites as a typeface and has done since we played telephone tag over 20 years ago when I was a teenager learning about typography. (Your secretary, then as now, always referred to you as “Professor Knuth.” Do Starbucks baristas have to do the same?)
[Y]ou complain that I don’t give
altspecifications with any of the images. But the Netscape DTD I have used for more than 3,000 days does not require it.
Then you, and it, have been wrong for 3,000 days. Here we have a great computer scientist who can’t be arsed to write his own alt texts. You’ve never had a blind student even once? How the hell is T.V. Raman supposed to use your site?
To change all these pages will cost me a week’s time.
I can’t program worth shit and I can change a couple of hundred pages in BBEdit in minutes. In fact, over the years, I have – repeatedly. What’s your problem?
So, my former friends, please tell me… when you are going to fix the problem
Never, because you’re going to fix it yourself. They’re your pages, not ours. Web standards are your responsibility. You can’t just order the little people around, you know.
Excuse me, that was a bit flamey, wasn’t it, and certainly egocentric.
“This just in: DON KNUTH AN EGOCENTRIC FLAMER.”