Having been on the web since the early versions of Mosaic/X while still at the University of Illinois, and coded my first HTML not so far long thereafter... it occurs to me that its about time to throw some of my early adopter crumudgeon-ness to the curb... in much the same way I did for MIME and other "end of the world as we know it" technologies. Hell, HTML4 has been a specification since 1998... and HTML3.2 since 1995... but until recently, I'd avoided nearly all usage of these "advanced" features on the basis of "there is no need" or the fact that some percentage of users wouldn't be able to use them.

The fact of the matter is, those days are long gone. Sure, WebTV suckers are probably still using IE3 based browsers... and people on hand-held devices are stuck in the suck of WML or some bastardization... but the prevalence of IE5 and higher and the recent release of Mozilla 1.0 means that we no longer have to constrain ourselves to such limited effects any more... sure, you should still make a small effort to make your site useable for the less enlightened, but its long past time to start taking advantage of what we can do. At eGroups, we even had to contend with people using email to web gateways... but even Yahoo! has a new version of their mail/addressbook/calendar interface with dynamic html and javascript.

So here's to the brave new world... and to those of you still complaining about HTML in your mail or people forwarding Word Documents... go right ahead. But you should be using mutt and catdoc anyways, and leaving your stress for things that might actually matter.