Comment by lolc

9 hours ago

> The whole point of HTML's design is that it's incredibly easy for a human to write correctly.

A lot of people (me included) used text editors to write HTML. The process was not easy, and the results mostly not correct.

HTML at the time was intended as an application of SGML. This is the first example of HTML from RFC 1866 that laid out HTML 2.0 in 1995:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
    <title>Parsing Example</title>
    <p>Some text. <em>&#42;wow&#42;</em></p>

Using an HTML editor was required if you wanted to get anywhere near that standard.

1 comment

lolc

bandrami 8 hours ago

> HTML at the time was intended as an application of SGML

Worse, it was an extended superset (ha!) of SGML. At least 20 years ago, SGML::Parser would reject some valid HTML documents.

That said, it was really easy to type correctly in a text editor (especially compared to actual SGML), particularly one that indented and matched tags for you.