Bruce Lawson's personal site

Got myself a cowpath-pavin’ Open-web savin’ Living Standard

To commemorate the fact that HTML5 has been renamed HTML (at least by the WHATWG, but not by the W3C) and “the WHATWG HTML spec can now be considered a ‘living standard'”, it seemed only right to unleash The Axe Of Glory™ (my acoustic guitar) for another song.

Serious bit: the lyrics are just a bit of fun. I don’t really believe that if you dislike this change you’re inferior or that concensus-denyin’ is always a good spec development model. This is mostly to give me a video to test the new vid.ly service, that converts and hosts the video for HTML5 browsers with a Flash fallback. (It does a good job, but oddly serves Ogg video to Opera 11 rather than webM and its HTML email to tell you that conversion is complete is badly broken.)

So, with that said and with apologies to Sir Clifford of Richard and Lionel Bart, here is my new song, “Living Standard”.

Sing along.

If the video isn’t working, watch it on YouTube.

Got myself an always-evolving, problem-solving Living Standard
much better than Five, cos it’s alive, my Living Standard.
Superior persons don’t need a version, so Hixie canned it!
Got myself a cowpath-pavin’ Open-web savin’ Living Standard.

Take a look at the spec, it’s vast.
If you don’t believe what it says, you’re so past.
Gonna love that spec, so no proprietary tech
can steal the Web from me.

Got myself a never-completin’, concensus-defeatin’ Living Standard
much better than Five, cos it’s alive, my Living Standard.
Superior persons don’t need a version, so Hixie canned it!
Got myself a error-correctin’ numeral-rejectin’ living standard.

Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)

25 Responses to “ Got myself a cowpath-pavin’ Open-web savin’ Living Standard ”

Comment by steve faulkner

look forward to you dropping the use of the term ‘HTML5’ altogether and renaming your book ‘Introducing HTML the Living Standard’ 🙂

Comment by Bruce

Dan – in my tests, browsers that can’t deal with native video either get the Flash video (Internet Explorer) or a download link (Opera Mini). Are you seeing nothing at all?

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