Information wants to be good

A great article was posted on the ICG web site called "Information Wants to be Good." Among the many good points in the article is that sometimes bad or misleading information is worse than no information at all. Bravo!

The thing that caught my eye is the example used to lead into the point -- what is known as the "Palau" problem to us folks who reside in Pennsylvania. Some time ago, a programmer used a list of US states that inaccurately included the island nation of Palau among the states. It would be humorous if this just happened once, but it is downright frustrating how much this error has propagated throughout the web, especially for those of us who fill out web forms in the state of Pennsylvania. OK, maybe frustrating is too strong, but certainly annoying!

The importance of precise semantic markup is only increasing, and this post hints at a growing discontent among users for bad or disorganized information. The trend is definitely headed back in the 'quality' direction, and that's a good thing for anyone who takes pride in the quality of their content.

--Jabin White