it's really quite something how much of a mess html has become

[doriantaylor@mastodon.social]

it's really quite something how much of a mess html has become

[doriantaylor@mastodon.social]

like say what you will about html4 (or xhtml1 for that matter), it was at least relatively orderly, and with the exception (?) of links could be described by declarative means like dtd

now it's like, there's all kinds of conditions all over the place

ii dunno, could you describe html faithfully with eg relaxng? or do you have to fudge it?

[mkornblum@hachyderm.io]

@doriantaylor I have a strong memory of setting my (xhtml) personal site to be served as XML with the right headers and being pleasantly surprised when syntax errors in markup showed up as XML parser failures rather than the browser doing its normal “best guess” thing and rendering a janky page. Felt like bringing compiled language syntax discipline to the web, and at the time that seemed like progress to me.

I also think that is why xhtml ultimately lost to html 4 and 5 though; I can’t imagine trying to run a CMS or any other site heavily focused on user generated content if the whole thing has to be valid as XML at all times. I’ve also come to think not everything needs to have that level of syntax rigor, and the democratic nature of the web is (was?) one of its best qualities

[doriantaylor@mastodon.social]

@mkornblum the current crop of html spec people (going back probably 2 decades tbh) consider the rigour of xml to be a liability; i'm half there with them but i've also seen them basically reinvent the xml wheel in the interim, and poorly

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@doriantaylor @mkornblum that's in fact one of the motivations for the creation of the WHATWG by Opera and Mozilla. Then Google took over and it went to shit.

[doriantaylor@mastodon.social]

@oblomov @mkornblum imo xml was a necessary stepping stone to get everybody using unicode in general and utf8 in particular, as well as just thinking about general-purpose text-based (ie not bit-packed) exchange format in general; before xml the scene was pretty bleak

there are valid criticisms of xml but i think it's Just Fine, Actually™ and most of them (like namespaces for example) reduce to people just being whiny babies