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RSS is a dialect of XML.

This is incorrect. RSS is an application of XML.

[...] software that uses an XML dialect will still work after the dialect is extended.

This is also incorrect. XML is not magically backward compatible. The correct thing to say is that XML sometimes makes it possible to design an XML-based data format that is backward compatible. For example, there are nine different, incompatible versions of RSS.

Microsoft might actually be doing the world a favour by introducing their own funky version, since that's likely to be the version that everyone actually uses. It (or a subset thereof) may end up being the thing everyone can actually use without worrying about incompatibilies.

Ah, who am I kidding? It'll be a horrible mess on par with HTML of the mid-nineties.

Isn't the title (an the cover graphic) a bit derivative of http://diveintomark.org/, and his corpus of Dive Into books and articles?

if you tell me that it is because the Gimp is part of the OS, let me tell you that it is NOT, and you CAN install it on Windows too, so no, there is no point comparing them!

Of course you can install stuff on a plain Windows XP installation to make it usable. Just look here.

well, a bunch of people have suggested that 302s should only be honored by crawlers if the domain is the same.

The problem with that is that there are legitimate cases where 302s need to go across domains. For example, I own a domain name and use a commercial DNS provider to forward requests to my current ISP's webspace. If I change ISPs, that will change so I want Google to treat my domain name as the canonical name of my website.

Alternately, someone using temporary hosting to handle a sudden surge of bandwidth might use 302s in the short term but would want Google to continue to associate the pages with the forwarding domain.

Of course, if you amend the suggestion to "honour 302s if the domain is the same or if the destination site has metatags naming the originator as part of the site", you end up with my original suggestion.

why do you say that? how is the web broken because of the way google crawls it?

It's not about Google. (Or, it is but only because Google is the big name in searching. When someone else replaces them as the search leader, it'll become about them instead.)

Google's search algorithm isn't so much an invention as a discovery. Long before Google existed, the world-wide web contained within it a way to reliably index most of its contents--the network of links. Google's founders simply discovered it and figured out how to mine that data. It's the Internet equivalent of a natural resource.

(Which is not to say that Google isn't brilliant or a huge achievement.)

And as usual, as soon as someone with a financial interest comes along, they start despoiling it. Email existed and was perfectly usable for over fifteen years before the spammers got into it and only then did people realize that maybe, there should have been a better authentication system built into it. Ditto for USENET and, more recently, blog comments.

Well, now it's the web's turn. The days where search engines "just worked" are over. We, who operate websites, have to start pitching in to protect the structure. It's already started with the "nofollow" attribute and it'll have to continue or the web will become unsearchable.

Okay, this argument has gone on well beyond its sell-by date and, while it confuses me that you'd rather lower barriers to entry for browser developers than to content producers (even though the latter outweigh the former by hundreds to one, and the former are the ones with the existing heavy technical skills), that's your prerogative.

However, I think these two pieces argue against your position more thoroughly than I ever could:
Thought Experiment
The history of draconian error handling in XML

Enjoy.

Okay, this argument has gone on well beyond its sell-by date and, while it confuses me that you'd rather lower barriers to entry for browser developers than to content producers (even though the latter outweigh the former by hundreds to one, and the former are the ones with the existing heavy technical skills), that's your prerogative.

However, I think these two pieces argue against your position more thoroughly than I ever could:
Thought Experiment
The history of draconian error handling in XML

Enjoy.

Mark Pilgrim once blogged about him being a recovering alcoholic. He never blogged about work or the people he worked with. However, the people he worked for at the time found out about the blog, as he was not anonymous and did not take great pains to hide it. Well the company did a really sleazy (and in hindsight stupid) action of asking him to take this information down. They thought customer's knowing this would make the company look bad. Mark refused and was eventually fired. I was definitely on his side for this one. Something's wrong with society if you are embarrassed about alcoholism and this is not the way to handle it, IMHO. It's stupid because Mark is now working for IBM in their corporate blogging division. That former company gave up a prime employee and Mark's making far more money now.

However, a few weeks later a fellow blogger of Mark's was then fired for making comments about a coworker in her blog. Mark took up her side, but as I talked to Mark, and reviewed the comments, it was little more than bitching about someone who was simply a pain in the ass. Okay fine, you work with someone who's a pain in the ass, but would you tell that to that person's face? This is what you are doing. She refused her companies demands to remove the information and she was sacked. Frankly this was just stupid. If you have a problem with someone, you take up with your boss. If you can't fix it, bitching about it in your blog is not going to help. Might make you feel better, but it will make you feel worse when the company has to discipline you.

And I myself was subject to some policy, but this was a common sense situation early in the days of blogging. I blogged at lunch occasionally and I was proud of my site. My boss found out as I had emailed them from home once. So she checked it out and she saw one or two time stamps in the middle of the day. She asked me and I told her this was because I did it at lunch. She asked me if I could minimize the appearance of this (she didn't even ask me to stop!) I simply changed the timestamp on my posts to later in the day after work.

It's ironic, because, some of my topics deal with very confrontational stances on American society and politics. Hell let me be blunt, I flame 90% of americans in most posts. But she never once mentioned anything about content, because I never talk about the company or our customers in any way.

Sometimes, your principles are more important than your job, sometimes your principles are way skewed, and sometimes you just get lucky and work for understanding people. You have to understand what can get you in trouble and what can't, and balance that with what you absolutely have to speak out about.

If you must insult everyone, make sure you have a steady source of income from a private business that doesn't care what you say.

[disclaimer: I am a developer and a Logic Nazi. The term "Logic Nazi" implies that I may not know much, but I sure like to show off.]

It's a coding system, not a cypher.

Many will shrug at the difference, but it is quite essential. Coding (at least useful coding) is meant to translate things into numbers and then back to their original form -- so that you can apply logic science to various non-trivial concepts. Cyphering is meant to add some secret to your numbers in such a way that you need the same secret to get your numbers back.

In very simplified terms, Coding is making things numbers, and Cyphering is trying to protect those numbers from getting stolen by third parties.

Are you trying to imply that the thousands of XHTML Strict websites out there produced by web/graphic designers, web developers, bloggers, and those who are supporting the standards are doing something wrong?

Yup. Check out Ian Hickson's "Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful" for a quick primer on what most sites that do XHTML are doing wrong. Check out Evan Goer's list of "X-Philes" for a list of the very few sites which get it right, and his purge of sites from that list for an indication of how easy it is to go wrong even after you've initially gotten it right.

As for HTML generally not producing good markup and being "too loose", I hate to break it to you but XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4.01 are element-for-element identical; the only difference between the two is that one is an SGML application and one is an XML application. And when you serve XHTML 1.0 as "text/html" (e.g., when you do XHTML the way ESPN and others do) you don't gain any of the strictness benefits of XML. And the only thing XHTML 1.1 does on top of that is deprecate a couple more things and add modularization and ruby support, so I'm really not sure where all the "good markup" would come from in a transition to XHTML. Plus there's no reason to believe that serving XHTML 1.1 as "text/html" is conformant, so if you use 1.1 you either break the spec or you shut out IE. Likewise, switching to an XHTML DOCTYPE and using XML syntax doesn't magically confer accessibility on a page; it's just as easy to write a horrid, bloated, table-based images-for-everything page in XHTML as it is in HTML 4.01.

I suspect that you're making a common mistake among people who've just discovered web standards: you're confusing XHTML with good markup and best practices (check out Molly Holzschlag on what standards are and aren't). Anyway, it's quite possible to write beautiful, clean, accessible, semantically rich HTML 4.01 with separation of content from presentation; after all, it's got the same set of tags and attributes as XHTML 1.0, so if you can do it in one you can do it in the other just as easily. And when you consider that serving valid, well-formed XHTML according to the spec can be a nightmare at times, it's no surprise that even "gurus" of the standards world (e.g., Mark Pilgrim, Anne van Kesteren) have gone back to or recommended sticking with HTML 4.01 unless you really need one of the features gained by an XML-based HTML.

And lest you continue to think I'm some sort of skeptic or enemey of web standards, well, every site I've built in the past three years (basically, since I discovered there was such a thing as a "web standard") has been valid, accessible, and CSS-based. I just know from experience that valid markup and stylesheets are one part of the equation, and there are an awful lot of those "best practices" that aren't ever published in a spec from the W3C or anyone else.

Are you trying to imply that the thousands of XHTML Strict websites out there produced by web/graphic designers, web developers, bloggers, and those who are supporting the standards are doing something wrong?

Yup. Check out Ian Hickson's "Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful" for a quick primer on what most sites that do XHTML are doing wrong. Check out Evan Goer's list of "X-Philes" for a list of the very few sites which get it right, and his purge of sites from that list for an indication of how easy it is to go wrong even after you've initially gotten it right.

As for HTML generally not producing good markup and being "too loose", I hate to break it to you but XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4.01 are element-for-element identical; the only difference between the two is that one is an SGML application and one is an XML application. And when you serve XHTML 1.0 as "text/html" (e.g., when you do XHTML the way ESPN and others do) you don't gain any of the strictness benefits of XML. And the only thing XHTML 1.1 does on top of that is deprecate a couple more things and add modularization and ruby support, so I'm really not sure where all the "good markup" would come from in a transition to XHTML. Plus there's no reason to believe that serving XHTML 1.1 as "text/html" is conformant, so if you use 1.1 you either break the spec or you shut out IE. Likewise, switching to an XHTML DOCTYPE and using XML syntax doesn't magically confer accessibility on a page; it's just as easy to write a horrid, bloated, table-based images-for-everything page in XHTML as it is in HTML 4.01.

I suspect that you're making a common mistake among people who've just discovered web standards: you're confusing XHTML with good markup and best practices (check out Molly Holzschlag on what standards are and aren't). Anyway, it's quite possible to write beautiful, clean, accessible, semantically rich HTML 4.01 with separation of content from presentation; after all, it's got the same set of tags and attributes as XHTML 1.0, so if you can do it in one you can do it in the other just as easily. And when you consider that serving valid, well-formed XHTML according to the spec can be a nightmare at times, it's no surprise that even "gurus" of the standards world (e.g., Mark Pilgrim, Anne van Kesteren) have gone back to or recommended sticking with HTML 4.01 unless you really need one of the features gained by an XML-based HTML.

And lest you continue to think I'm some sort of skeptic or enemey of web standards, well, every site I've built in the past three years (basically, since I discovered there was such a thing as a "web standard") has been valid, accessible, and CSS-based. I just know from experience that valid markup and stylesheets are one part of the equation, and there are an awful lot of those "best practices" that aren't ever published in a spec from the W3C or anyone else.

RSS is more standard than email, so I can parse the data in a common format.

Which common format would that be?
At last count there were 9 incompatable versions of RSS. And then there's Atom, which itself has a few incompatable versions floating out there in the wild.

And that's not counting the lack of content standards. Should they be full-text or excerpts? Should they include the author, the subject, the category? Should they contain full-size images? Should they contain enclosures? Should they contain style code? Should they contain ads? Everyone does it differently, and it's fucking infuriating.

I use the hell out of RSS, but it is by no means "standard".

• 9 incompatible versions are a problem for writing clients.
• ASCII only means RSS2.0 is no use to the non-english speaking world.
• Dave winer being a loser is also a problem.

...surely combining the two formats (Atom and RSS) would be beneficial, lest we end up with another VHS/Beta or DVD+/-RW/RAM situation...

That's actually why Atom was first proposed. After Netscape lost control of the standard, RSS spintered into seven incompatible versions! Atom is an attempt to merge and stabilize the best of "Really Simple Syndication", "RDF Site Summary", and everything in between. The reason Google uses Atom, is because Blogger is a major sponser. Personally, I think Atom has an impressive design (although some is still a little clunky). Note that the final draft has yet to be published, as Atom isn't even 1.0 yet!

Although there are technically 3 different RSS formats because of the non-backwards compatible changes they keep making.

I could be mistaken but I'm too tired to check his site now.. You do it ;).

I did. You are right.

Being not so picky about broken html is a bad thing, it encouraged people to code broken html and think it's acceptable.

Being liberal in what you expect. It's a good thing.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go run GNU grep and watch it not crash on random data. Though this is probably a mistake; it encourages people to use obscure and proprietary binary file formats rather than plain text.

1. Back up entire d: drive to iMac upstairs. rsync rocks.
2. Find Windows XP install disc.
3. Reboot with Windows XP install disc.
4. Asked for product activation. Curse Microsoft.
5. Search my house in vain for my original, 100% legitimate, retail Windows XP box.
6. Reboot.
7. Search control panels in vain for a window, dialog, tab, or pane that displays my current product key.
8. Search Google for "windows xp get current product key".
9. Find a utility on a cracker web page in Russia that displays the current product key. This is one of the more lame utilities, since most of the good ones allow you to change it. I don't wish to change it; I actually have a perfectly good product key, I just don't know what it is.
10. Reboot with Windows XP install disc.
11. Reboot repeatedly as required.
12. Boot screen. Choose between "Windows XP Professional" and "Windows XP Professional". Brilliant. Pick one. The wrong one. Boot into fucked Windows XP install. Hard reboot. Pick the right one. Make mental note to hack boot.ini later.
13. "Welcome to Windows XP. You have no useful programs and no internet access. You have 30 days left for activation. Would you like to activate now?" Yes, I would, but I have no internet access.
14. Unnecessarily loud and cheerful startup noises. Make mental note to turn off all sounds later.
15. Search the "Network and Internet Connections" wizards in vain for some way to set up my Linksys wireless card. Having never done a clean install of XP (I previously upgraded from Windows 2000), and having been moderately impressed by the new wireless networking features in XP, I naively assumed this would "just work". Silly rabbit.
16. Search my house for my Linksys wireless card driver install disc. Find the install disc that came with the old card, that broke and was replaced by the new-and-improved version 3.0 card. Wonder if that will suffice.
17. Fight with the "Add New Hardware Wizard" trying to install the obviously inferior drivers off this disc.
18. Wonder where the "Device Manager" is hiding.
19. Find the "Device Manager". Right-click on the unknown device, "Linksys_Instant_Wireless_Card". Update driver. "Windows was unable to locate a driver for this device. Would you like to search on the internet?" Yes, I'd love to, but I can't, you moron. Install driver from specific location. Specify WIN2000 folder on old-and-inferior install disc.
20. "This driver is not digitally signed." OK.
21. "This driver may cause your computer to become unstable." OK.
22. "This driver may anally rape your mother while pouring sugar down your gas tank." OK.
23. Nothing. No connection, no internet access, no acknowledgment of any device whatsoever.
24. Reboot.
25. Doesn't work.
26. "Take a tour of Windows XP!" I am.
27. Reboot.
28. Doesn't work.
29. Dig out old wired PCMCIA card. Take computer upstairs. Plug directly into switch. cmd. ipconfig. We have an IP address. ping www.google.com. We have name resolution and internet access.
30. Fire up Internet Explorer. runonce.msn.com. No. www.linksys.com. Support. Downloads. WPC11. Windows XP. Linksys.com rocks.
31. Insert Linksys wireless card.
32. Back to Device Manager.
33. Uninstall old-and-inferior driver.
34. Update driver.
35. "This driver is not digitally signed." OK.
36. "This driver may cause your computer to become unstable." OK.
37. "This driver may…" OK.
38. cmd. ipconfig. We have internet access.
39. "Add your .NET Passport to Windows XP!" No.
40. Fire up Internet Explorer. www.msn.com. No. www.mozilla.org. Download Mozilla.
41. Realize I should create an "f8dy" user because it will make my life easier later.
42. Create "f8dy" as an administrator. Log out. Log in.
43. Install Mozilla. Yes, I would like to make you my default

I wish the parent post could be modded up even further. The problem with RSS is that the spec is sufficiently vague that it is practically guaranteed that any RSS parser you write will eventually encounter an RSS feed that is valid according to the spec but cannot be correctly parsed. It's a mess.

If you really want to open your eyes, download the Universal Feed Parser and take a look at the enormous number of test cases that the author uses.

It's hoped that Atom will benefit from the tremendous amount of accumulated experience and knowledged gained by watching the failures of RSS. The analogy might be that Atom is to RSS as XHTML 2.0 is to HTML, with the exception that we hope it's not too late to adopt Atom (as is surely the case with XHTML 2.0).

There are 9 versions of RSS, all of which are incompatible with various other versions. RSS 0.90 is incompatible with Netscape's RSS 0.91, Netscape's RSS 0.91 is incompatible with Userland's RSS 0.91, Netscape's RSS 0.91 is incompatible with RSS 1.0, Userland's RSS 0.91 is incompatible with RSS 0.92, RSS 0.92 is incompatible with RSS 0.93, RSS 0.93 is incompatible with RSS 0.94, RSS 0.94 is incompatible with RSS 2.0, and RSS 2.0 is incompatible with itself.

During the recent call for comments over changing the RSS 2.0 specification, Mark Pilgrim supplied a test case to show that it was a non-backwards-compatible change.

While Dave Winer is supposed to not control the RSS specification, he managed to delete Mark Pilgrim's comments as he has control over the server the comment system runs on.

Mark and Dave don't get on; that's no big secret. But Dave interfered with feedback because of his grudge against Mark. I don't think anybody should claim that RSS is not under Dave's control.

It can be found here:

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedo m-0

Mark Pilgrim has a great article on his migration.

XHTML is not fucking stupid, but it can be quite annoying, when you have to deal with

• The mime type hell. text/html vs application/xhtml+xml
• The difference between the HTML DOM and XML DOM in javascript
• The much praised XML feature, fail hard if the syntax is wrong. It's great when developing software, but could be irritating when you have to deal with crappy markup (the one normal humans write).

On the other hand, it's neat to edit XHTML in nxml-mode in emacs.

From Dive Into Mark.

Also, glad Slashdot FINALLY got a Google section/logo.

Heh, that reminded me of Mark Pilgrim's amusing How to install XP in 5 hours or less rant :)

well you're right, windows does require a lot of tweaking before I even get around to installing apps...

See also: This post on diveintomark.com called How To Install Windows XP In 5 Hours Or Less.

It looks cool, but too bad it's got some problems with accessibility.

Someone else reading Dive into Mark?

The thing to be a cross between web mail and a desktop email client: it is written in several hundred kilobytes of javascript.

I agree. There are other problems with it, though. Can you say lock-in?

> Mark Pilgrim, complaining GMail's JavaScript broke his Firefox shortcuts.

Surely that should read:

Mark Pilgrim complaining that Gmail:
Doesn't work in lynx (or any other non graphical browser)
Actively discriminates against the blind
Requires cookies in order to load
Breaks bookmarking
Breaks the back button
Breaks browser keyboard navigation

Summary: "The only way Gmail could be less accessible is if the entire site were built in Flash." Privacy concerns be damned. Anyone who believes that *any* webmail service offers privacy is, at best, deluded. These are the real issues. I'm not prepared to support a service which discriminate against minority browsers or those with disabilities. I use Google for near 100% of my searching needs but, until they get somone with half a clue about web design on board (and I don't just mean the clean layout, I mean clean, functional code) won't go anywhere near Gmail.

No doubt thousands of people will jump on service because it says Google on the tin. Such is life I suppose. Just remember, next tme you hork X and need to access a mailng list using Lynx, you should pay attention to accessibility issues because accessibility is for everyone.

If your web site doesn't work in Lynx, your web site is thoroughly, thoroughly fucked.

The only way to use Gmail is the way that the Gmail designers use Gmail. The only way Gmail could be less accessible is if the entire site were built in Flash.

If your web site doesn't work in Lynx, your web site is thoroughly, thoroughly fucked.

The only way to use Gmail is the way that the Gmail designers use Gmail. The only way Gmail could be less accessible is if the entire site were built in Flash.

It's hardly a good review. It's descriptive of the features, but the author makes it a point to emphasize apparent facts. He dedicates one paragraph just defending the fact that 1 GB is good for you, as if there was strong opposition and people lined up with posters "Give me back my Hotmail 2 MB!" outside of Google's offices.

Then in two paragraphs he explains what "clear text" means, providing gratuitous analogies of your ISP techs potentially reading your e-mail.

Here're some more interesting first-hand experiences:

GMail review, about spam filters and all

Another review with screenshots

Review from a current user with pictures and information on ads

Mark Pilgrim, complaining GMail's JavaScript broke his Firefox shortcuts.

It's a shame they're using RSS, as it's a good idea with a bad implementation. There are currently 9 different versions of RSS, and all of them incompatible with one another. It ought to be replaced with a better technology like Atom. However, this does look like an interesting project, nonetheless.

Spammers will proffit no matter how many e-mail addresses they spam. They already know a vast majority of the addresses won't result in costummers. Spam is the only avertising industry where the marketter isn't trying to create a long term relationship with the costummer.

Your just stuffing spammers databases with garbage.

Instead of a DDoP try a DDoH (Distributed Denial of Harvest) no addresses means no spam.. no valid addresses anyway.

Spam harvesting bots ignore all the web crawler rules. Some websites when visted by spam bots are knocked offline by a flood of requests.
Others just receave exessive work loads as spam bots flood CGI, API and PHP code with requests.

This dosen't happen normally when say GoogleBot visits. That is becouse GoogleBot won't visit a website more than once in a given piriod of time. They folow the robots.txt rules and won't go to webpages robots.txt forbids.

But spammers by nature pritty much ignore all the rules. (Else they wouldn't spam now would thay?).
This flavrent disreguard for the rules makes SpamBots easy to spot.

Webmasters will tell those nasty crittys to go to hell by blocking them.

Whats better feeding spam bots junk e-mail addresses or not feeding them at all?

But I'm curious about Atom, any idea when it'll reach 1.0?

My guess is probably by the end of the year. The best place to read about its development, besides the relevent mailing lists, are Mark Pilgrim's and Sam Ruby's weblogs.

Atom has recently been submitted to the IETF for standardization.

Plus, quite a few aggregators coming out these days are based on Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser, which is one of the most well-behaved aggregator backends out there.

And finally, for aggregators which understand certain of the namespaced extensions developed for RSS 1.0, there are the <sy:updatePeriod> and <sy:updateFrequency> elements from the syndication module, which allow you to tell the aggregator how often it should poll your feed.

And if you don't feel like reading that, just think of Emacs and XEmacs, but replace RMS with Dave Winer.

Why is it these days it seems like high UID = Microsoft Apologist?

Granted, but the web's 'unFUBARness' and forgiving/liberal parsing of HTML, is a large part of its success.

In contrast, Mark Pilgrim, has been documenting the evolution of XML's error handling (which is pretty much "fail on first error"). Something I personally think is good (in the projects where we use XML), but general adoption is far slower. The threshold - while pretty low - is too high.

I'm replying again - I just found that you can set the screenshot output to jpeg as default: the instructions are here. FYI, I've not tested this method.

I think spam is on its way out-- we recently integrated spamassassin into our email server and spam is a thing of the past. With programs like these being integrated on the ISP level now and in the future combined with individual email packages getting smarter about spam I think we can kill spam dead.

Atleast in email form. Instant message spam, cellphone text spam and of course..

uhm uhm uhm... visit this hot pr0n site!

comment spam :P Its becoming a problem. But now you can fight it!

That bit about how easy it is to install wireless cards? Bullshit, linux-compatible or not, if you've got the wrong distribution. And even when you do, it might break: I've just managed to apt-get-upgrade my way out of a working wireless setup, and it's going to take a more lot of my precious time to wallow through bash scripts and config files to find out what's wrong than an XP driver reinstall would. Windows users have problems with software installing itself when you don't ask for it? Hey, look, RedHat will install SendMail, Cups and a stack of other stuff even when you specifically tell it not to.

If you're willing to download some software to make your XPerience a bit better, get TweakUI, turn off the popups and leave it be. It'll take five minutes, and you're done, forever. Star Office runs well on windows? Woo. Whoopee - try using MS Office for a bit. It's only about a billion times better. Windows doesn't come with that product because it is good enough to sell: in comparsion, Star Office is clearly only good enough to give away. I run Linux exclusively, and you know what? It sucks. I don't know if you've been informed, but it really does. Just a few weeks, ago, Keith Packard made it possible to change the resolution and color depth of X-windows without actually restarting the server. I've been able to do that in every other UI I've used since approximately tbe bronze age. Christ, it's only recently that I've been able to eject a CD by pressing the button, and wasn't that a breath of fresh air.

Mod this whatever you like, I could not possibly care less. Here's the news: this kind of blind, patronising zealotry exists so that the zealots can feel superior, and maybe chortle amongst themselves. It's for losers, in other words.

than does GNU/Linux/KDE.
Does the usability rating include the usability of having to backup your data, reinstall, restore data every few months? I think not

How Cheese Man got mixed up is beyond me, as comment by George A. Theall is clearly displayed at the bottom of the comment.

• aagh.net -- degrades gracefully, uses real (X)HTML properly, has clean URL's, simple and clear navigation, plenty of <link>'s, and is one of the few sites I know of that not only serves XHTML as application/xhtml+xml as it should be, but serves HTML 4.01 to clients that don't support it. Yes, it's my site ;)
• xiven.com -- honourable mention :)
• diveintomark.org -- aside from the braindead US date format he uses, it rules.
• DevEdge -- clean, degrades very well.
• kuro5hin -- Has a nice fresh creamy flavour.

Take a look at one guy's experiences with blocking rude bots and spiders. Mark is a buddy of mine and this got him pretty steamed.

--Paul

Safari was the only browser that was perfect on all tests. I could certainly develop some tests [diveintomark.org] that safari would fail....

diveintomark.org details CSS and rendering issues. This was a JavaScript test.

Seriously, is this meaningful in any way whatsoever?

What would you rather Steve said? "Safari is insanlely great!"? Apple posted a reproducable test suite that outlined some of Safari's positives and negatives. As for Apple saying "We're Great", the conclusion reads "The new Safari 1.0 beta is a strong contender." Safari went toe-to-toe with Mozilla and came out alive. That is quite an accomplishment and Apple should be commended for it.