For various reasons, I've been thinking about absurdism lately. I'm especially fond of works such as Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead", and Samuel Beckett's "Endgame" (both of which I happened to see at UMD many, many years ago ... maybe that has something to do with it). But of all the places you might find absurdism, I never expected to see it in HTML code.
Today, buried in the depths of JSP/HTML, I came across a "summary" attribute for a table that made me really stop and think. Now, the point of a "summary" attribute, is SUPPOSED to alert screen readers and other text-only display devices, and help describe the information contained in the table. This summary was strait forward, and absolutely absurd:
Yep. Absolutely correct, yet absolutely useless information. Beautiful, in it's way.
Still, if you follow the semantics of the HTML document, what Adobe Dreamweaver does for the "title" element is a downright contradiction:
Frankly, any software that writes HTML like this shouldn't be trusted.
:P
