Getting what you asked for

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Some time ago, Doug Crockford’s excellent blog pointed me to this page on “excessive DTD traffic” at the W3C. Go ahead and follow that link, I’ll wait…

All the standard templates that show how to construct a basic XHTML page include a public identifier of http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd and often a namespace name of http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml. As the blog points out, these are not actually hyperlinks, they only play them on TV. Huge quantities of software are requesting these URLs 24×7, putting a load on their servers. Often times this results from unfortunate defaults in off-the-shelf XML components such as parsers.

But what did you expect?

This is the web equivalent of having a front-desk receptionist hand out a stacks of self-addressed, stamped postcards, then complaining about how much mail the company gets from all around the world.

HTTP URLs are great for identifiers on a technical basis: they are based on DNS names and have the important qualities of uniqueness and persistence. But as far as human factors go, they are a terrible choice (though with a great deal of inertia at this point). -m

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