He’s Just Had Coffee

Caution: the following is a little childish.

My friend Greg and I were comparing the websites of various religions and we figured we should take a look at the Vatican — who you’d assume would have a reasonable budget for web designers.

Now for context, I teach web technology, so I’m a bit of a snob about site design. The Vatican front page looks alright, but the “huge table full of images” approach is a bit ten years ago. The page has no DOCTYPE declaration so it won’t validate, the images don’t mostly have “alt” attributes so it’s not terribly accessible. All in all, it’s all a bit lame.

The funniest part was the page metadata:

<META content=”Gesù Cristo, Chiesa Cattolica, Vaticano, Papa Giovanni Paolo, Santo Padre, Cattolica Romana, Curia Romana, Jesus Christ, Catholic Church, Vatican, Pope John Paul, Holy Father, Roman Catholic, Roman Curia, Jésus-Christ, église catholique, vatican, saint-père, pape jean-paul, Curie Romaine, Catholique romaine, Der Heilige Vater, Die Römische Kurie, Johannes Paul, Der Heilige Stuhl, Vatikan” name=subject>

Wait. No-one’s updated the metadata since JPII “crossed over”? Does Benny know?

In the end we decided to run the page through the W3C Validator for a look at how badly the HTML didn’t validate. Then Greg had the idea that if you replaced “page” with “religion” in the validation report the results might be amusing. After that, things got a little out of control…

No God found! Attempting validation with Jehovah 4.01 Transitional.
The God Declaration was not recognized or is missing. This probably means that the Formal Public Identifier contains a spelling error, or that the Declaration is not using correct syntax. Validation has been performed using a default “fallback” God Definition that closely resembles “Jehovah 4.01 Transitional”, but the religion will not be Valid until you have corrected this problem with the God Declaration.
You should place a God declaration as the very first thing in your Jehovah religion.

You have used the doctrine named above in your religion, but the God you are using does not support that doctrine for this belief. This error is often caused by incorrect use of the “Strict” God with a religion that uses frames (e.g. you must use the “Transitional” God to get the “target” doctrine), or by using vendor proprietary extensions such as “marginheight” (this is usually fixed by using heresy to achieve the desired effect instead).
This error may also result if the belief itself is not supported in the God you are using, as an undefined belief will have no supported doctrines; in this case, see the belief-undefined error message for further information.

We’re thinking of suggesting the W3C might like to release a religion validator…