I was reading Jeremy Keith’s awesome live blogging session from An Event Apart Boston the other day during my lunch break. Jeremy was definitely in top form and doing an awesome job. I almost felt like I was actually there. I even caught myself commenting out loud about Jeremy’s uncanny skill to turn a phrase, or connect it to other tidbits of sometimes obscure, but always interesting bits of knowledge. So it shouldn’t be that surprising to anyone might have happened to overhear me and my pseudo-conversation with Jeremy, right? At least not for people who know me well.
At the same time, people who know me well also aren’t surprised when my mind grabs hold of some tidbit or wisp of thought, and tears off down it’s own little tangent to who knows where. So I wasn’t that surprised when happened this time. As I was reading Jeremy’s blog posts, off in the distance I heard Peter, Paul, and Mary’s version of “If I Had A Hammer.” The next thing you know my mind goes tearing off down it’s own little rabbit hole. I’d stopped reading Jeremy’s post about Veerle’s presentation, opened up a copy of notepad and my brain and fingers went into overdrive of their own accord. What happened next even managed to surprise me.
Now understand that in the past, Molly Holzschlag had made a Dylanesque quip that I had read on Twitter about HTML5. That quip led me to attempt to rewrite Bob Dylan’s “Times They Are A Changin” to be a Dylanesque tribute to HTML5. I’d affectionately nicknamed this “genre” of music as “Web Standards Rock” in homage to the School House Rock of my youth. Well, web standards rock has hit again, this time based off of Peter, Paul & Mary’s “If I had A Hammer” entitled, “If I Had A Doctype.”
If I Had A Doctype
If I had a doctype
I could be validated online
I could be validated locally….
I could show all the errors
I could show all the warnings
I could show the unescaped entities
All through the document
Ooo ooo ooo ooo
If I had a stylesheet
I wouldn’t need presentational markup
And my code, would be structured semantically
I could style all the borders
I could style all the elements
I could style all the content that you see
All through the document
Ooo ooo Ooo oo
If I had unobtrusive JavaScript
I could run it after page load
I could use it to improve functionality
I could use it to degrade gracefully
I could validate form input
I could improve the user experience
I could extend browser capabilities
All through the document
Ooo ooo Ooo oo
Well I’ve got a doctype
And I’ve got a stylesheet
And I’ve got unobtrusive JavaScript
I’ll even work in IE…
I can be validated online
I’ve been marked up semantically
I can even use CSS 3
All through the document
Ooo ooo oooo ooo