Comment by JoshTriplett
4 hours ago
With the benefit of hindsight, if the web had been that way from the beginning, I think we would have been better off. The moment you tested your content in any browser, you'd immediately see if it was broken.
But it wasn't something that could get introduced later, after all the broken content that already existed.
With all respect - the opposite is true. The web succeeded because HTML and HTTP are easy standards easily writable by humans with text editors. HTML was writable by non-programmers.
I don't think "parsed strictly" makes something hard; on the contrary, I think it's helpful to make something easy. Clear feedback, easy to test.
But then, I've always preferred strongly typed over stringly typed.
This imagines HTML as code and not markup.
The reason HTML and markdown are more widely adopted than latex is because the former are more forgiving.
4 replies →
That's not obviously so. The adoption of JS wasn't particularly hindered by the fact that users have to match their brackets and generally avoid syntax errors.
Yeah, I think SGML HTML as the first pass was a mistake. All my early websites were XHTML until people called them "bad"...