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I go to sleep for eight hours and the world explodes, bloody USA timezones. Unbenown to me – and I suspect quite a few people – a new draft of XHTML 2.0 was released in December, which Mark has now read and reported on. The results are somewhat suprising, coming from who they do:

Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant.

I’m migrating I’ve migrated to HTML 4.

I mentioned, when first I saw the spec, that it showed problems, but this is &emdash; like Scott Reynen says [I]t’s like jesus just came back and said “you know what, this whole religion thing is a crock.. Tantek has forwarded it to the www-html list, and I’m now watching my newsgroup feed of that very carefully…

And sticking to HTML4. Still.

On another note, I don’t appear to have mentioned my various rants about the Sendo Z100 that I was using at work. We were developing for it. I hated it with a passion, because of things like it taking 2 hrs to work out how to make a phone call, the fact that you couldn’t use the phone while it was recharging. To be fair to Sendo, all of the faults were software. For example, it was possible to turn off the phone bit of the phone so you could just use it as a PDA in somewhere like a hospital. To do this, you pressed the off button quickly, and then selected Radio Off from the menu. You repeat this to turn it on again.

Unfortunatly, the phone was shipped (to me, at least) with Radio Off, and pressing the off button to make a phone call wasn’t really intuitive. So I was less than suprised to see this article on ZDNet UK (via Oblomovka) about someone who had broken their leg on the alps:

To summon assistance I extracted my new SPV from my pocket and turned it on. Since the SPV uses a typical Microsoft operating system (and in contrast with my iPaq which comes to life instantaneously), the SPV takes about a minute or so to boot up. I spent this time pondering my fate and speculating whether the mile or so trip down the mountain would qualify me for a helicopter or skidoo ride.

The next time I looked at the phone it appeared to have turned itself off — so I tried switching it on again. When it eventually came to life I could not get it to dial — a closer examination revealed the legend ‘Radio off’ displayed very legibly on the SPV’s excellent screen. No amount of menu searching let me find anything that would turn the phone’s radio back on. At this point I remember making a few comments about the dubiousness of Bill Gates’ parentage. I eventually managed to flag down a passing skier who let me use her Nokia phone (which switched on immediately) to call for help.

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