When evolution fails

I am reading an excellent post by Brendan on the non-world non-wide non-web. With WHAT WG launching, people crying W3C foul and TBL actually in Finland this week for his 1 million EURO prize… it’s all getting quite interesting to say the least !

While reading the comments of Brendan’s post I read a comment by Robin Berjon which struck a chord:

To me the "small, incremental improvements to the ugly web" approach will make FireFox/Safari/etc be to IE6 what XHTML 1.x is to HTML. Neat increment, mostly a flop. Please don't take this as an attack (heck, I use your stuff day-in, day-out) but I would really like to see where you see a path to success in that strategy, because hard as I honestly try I don't.

When better things come along, evolved products and people don’t switch to it. Then evolution fails.

The average person does not want to change unless it “is an order of magnitude better (in whichever direction).”

In the natural world things get killed off don’t they? ;)

Well things are never simple. But if you like me have been at this web thing for awhile, can you confidently say all your pages are valid XHTML? Damn, I am sure as hell can’t. :/