Comment by vbezhenar
17 hours ago
Browser will parse that as three HTMLParagraphElements. You may think that's invalid HTML, but browser will parse it and won't indicate any kind of error.
17 hours ago
Browser will parse that as three HTMLParagraphElements. You may think that's invalid HTML, but browser will parse it and won't indicate any kind of error.
> Browser will parse that as three HTMLParagraphElements
Why?
> You may think that's invalid HTML, but browser will parse it and won't indicate any kind of error.
It isn’t an opinion, it literally is invalid HTML.
What you’re responding to is an assumption that I was suggesting browsers couldn’t render that. Which isn’t what I claimed at all. I know full well that browsers will gracefully handle incorrect HTML, but that doesn’t mean that the source is magically compliant with the HTML specification.
>Why?
Because the second open p-tag closes the first p-tag and then the last closing p has no matching starting p-tag and creates one thus resulting in 3 p-elements.
> It isn’t an opinion, it literally is invalid HTML.
the only "invalid" part is the last closing p.
> Why?
I don't know why. Try it out. That's the way browsers are coded.
> It isn’t an opinion, it literally is invalid HTML.
It matters not. You're writing HTML for browser to consume, not for validator to accept. And most of webpages are invalid HTML. This very HN page contains 412 errors and warnings according to W3C validator, so the whole point of HTML validness is moot.
> I don't know why. Try it out. That's the way browsers are coded.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I’d need more than that to be convinced. Sorry.
> It matters not. You're writing HTML for browser to consume, not for validator to accept.
It matters because you’re arguing a strawman argument.
We weren’t discussing what a browser can render. We were discussing the source code.
So your comment wasn’t a rebuttal of mine. It was a related tangent or addition.
2 replies →
> You're writing HTML for browser to consume, not for validator to accept.
I'm not a web programmer, but shouldn't one program against the specified interface instead of some edge case behavior of an implementation?
At the end of the day, browsers have to handle most of the invalid atrocities thrown at it.
It doesn't make the code valid according to the specifications.
My point is that by closing optional tags you can introduce subtle bugs into your layout that might take some time to find and browser won't be of any help. You write closing tag, browser will implicitly add starting tag. It's better to memorise which tags are optional and do not close them at all.
You can also introduce subtle bugs by not closing them. Or forgetting which tags can be closed and thus leaving the wrong ones dangling.
So I think your argument here is tough to take at face value. It feels a lot more like you’re arguing personal preference as fact.
Precisely, it's an added burden to remember and what might be skipped. The less many exception, the better.
Though if a linter is formatting the whole codebase on its own in an homogeneous way, and someone else will deal with the added parsing complexity, that might feel okayish also to me.
Generally speaking, the less clutter the better. A bit like with a js codebase which is semicolon free where possible.
For pleasant experience of read and write, html in a simple text editor is very low quality. Pug for example is bringing far less clutter, though mandatory space indentation could be avoided with some alternative syntactic choices.