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Comment by azangru | Hacker News Reader

An unrelated question: how many `html` and `body` tags are allowed on a web page? I just looked at the page source of https://dev.to/liquid_chickens/three-qualities-of-failed-mic..., and to my surprise noticed they have about five `html` and `body` tags on that page. They aren't even in iframes either.

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One and only one of each. And having more than 1 doctype declaration is ridiculous. Browsers are very resistent to garbage markup, so by looking at the parsed tree and not the raw text, I never actually noticed that.

I have no idea why they would do that. It looks like a misconfigurated preprocessor that thinks each fragment is a doc of its own. I vaguely recall something about them open-sourcing the frontend, so I might look into that...

Yep, my guess would be that they are using a markdown parser that generates a complete html document out of submitted markdown, and then they just stitch those parsed htmls together, like here (the processed_html method on the article instance):

https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/blob/master/app/vi...

> Browsers are very resistent to garbage markup

Miraculously so! Anything I would have attempted to design would have crapped its pants at the look of this markup, but browsers heroically manage to display it as if nothing weird is happening. I take my hat off to their resilience.

Yes. And actually, this is a mistake in our processing configuration. We don’t want separate body tags, but it hasn’t been a problem so we haven’t gotten around to fixing it.

PRs welcome. :)

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