Aja Lapus

Tag: ignorance

  • Apparently, The Philippines Does Not Exist

    As reported on the so-called—or better yet, the self-proclaimed—best daily newspaper on the world wide web, Kenya have set a world first with mobile money transfers. As far as I know, mobile remittance and money transfers are old technology here in the Philippines[1] even if I still haven’t been able to use the system.

    As ignorant as they may be, Guardian Unlimited’s Xan Rice and Safaricom CEO Michael Joseph expressed with enthusiasm their belief that the mobile money transfer concept is the next big thing in mobile telephony.[2] They haven’t acknowledged the fact that this concept was originally from the Philippines with millions of workers abroad using the services of local Philippine mobile providers. I could safely say that this kind of service is an old big thing for Filipinos. I guess they think they would attract more people into believing in their services as a breakthrough this way—making its worldwide market adoption much quicker—than telling the concept came from a poor and less known country.

    The report said that this new technology is being piloted by Vodaphone with the implementation on its partially owned corporation in Kenya—claiming to be the first country in the world to use this service. As the story shows, this M-PESA service from Safaricom is still being developed by Vodaphone, but it happens to be that Globe G-Cash™ and Smart Padala was already out of beta testing several years ago.[1]

    I guess no one could deny the fact that Filipinos are not technologically lagging. We are leading with highest numbers on SMS usage, and I believe we are leading with the most services using it. So I guess we deserve some credit[3] as well, for this is so evident it would not pass even a little bit as an Agapito Flores claim to technological advances.

    I guess I only have one explanation left that many other Filipinos would hately agree with: The Philippines does not exist.

    Footnotes:

  • To lead, you must follow

    I brag a lot about my web site … not about heavy-loading images — I cannot create them; not about flashy scripts — I don’t even want to look at them; and not about colorful design — I KISS. But, I brag about my source code, more than fifty percent of which you cannot see.

    Ok now, here’s more of the bragging part: I use valid markup on all my source code — even the stylesheets. I just can’t figure out why other web designers brag it along with their flashy web sites but after you’ve clicked on their “Valid XHTML” link or button, hundreds of errors come shooting out of the validator saying, “Stop! Please stop!”

    Ok, that was a bit exaggerated. I was the one saying those. 😆

    Practice what you preach.

    I cannot blame those people using pre-made or borrowed templates for having those validation links. But for those who make their own templates full of errors, proprietary tags and tag attributes, please do not tell me or anyone that you know HTML, because you don’t.

    Hey, I’m concerned. The Web wasn’t supposed to be filled with junk as you can see almost everywhere. HTML was supposed to be clean. But, yes, it is not. Now, if you want to participate along with thousands of other web standards advocates, please don’t just tell us you’ve got valid markup, show us.

    A law has been implemented and numerous standards recommendations[1][2][3] have been made but, sadly, it seems that only a few people acknowledge them.

    Ignorance is evident almost everywhere you look or surf. Most of them are personal sites ang blog sites, but even IT or tech sites, which should be promoting these standards are not following them.

    Standards-compliant code must be the standard. It must be a trend. It must be a habit. It doesn’t mean it is good if it just look good.

    True beauty comes from the inside.

    I almost came to linking those web sites I’ve been ranting about all day long (actually, “all entry long”) but I think I’d just have to make them realize it on their own. I really wouldn’t want to hurt anybody — I just want to heal the Web. 🙂

    Please take note that I’ve been ranting about web designers with validation links on their site that is full of errors, and not people who just make web sites they don’t intend to validate.

    Footnotes:

    1. ^ [XHTML1]XHTMLâ„¢ 1.0 The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition)
      W3C Recommendation 26 January 2000, revised 1 August 2002
    2. ^ [CSS2]Cascading Style Sheets, level 2
      W3C Recommendation 12 May 1998
    3. ^ [WAI-WCAG]Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
      W3C Recommendation 5 May 1999