Comment by neilv

I didn't know that Navigator was ever strict, and bit funny story about when I complained that they hadn't been strict...

Around 2000, I was meeting with Tim Berners-Lee, and I mentioned I'd been writing a bunch of Web utility code. He wanted to see, so I handed him some printed API docs I had with me. (He talked and read fast.)

Then I realized he was reading the editorializing in my permissive parser docs, about how browser vendors should've put a big error/warning message on the window for invalid HTML.

Which suddenly felt presumptuous of me, to be having opinions about Web standards, right in front of Tim Berners-Lee at the time.

(My thinking with the prominent warning message that every visitor would see, in mid/late-'90s, was that it would've been compelling social pressure at the time. It would imply that this gold rush dotcom or aspiring developer wasn't good at Web. Everyone was getting money in the belief that they knew anything at all about Web, with little way to evaluate how much they knew.)