Comment by theandrewbailey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theandrewbailey | Hacker News Reader

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theandrewbailey

> It's an interesting line of thinking though: exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived?

I've thought about this on and off for a few years. Here's what I've come up with:

1. Popularity. You can't really display anything in a web browser without it, blank pages with one AJAX script notwithstanding.

2. Ease of use. Open a text editor, type some markup, save the file with .html, and open in a browser. When you're done, transfer to a server to show the world. That's a pretty straightforward process.

3. Well-defined, open standard. Every important piece of the web is defined, from the markup to the protocol to transfer it. I think that reasonably bug-free implementations of those standards help.

I'd argue your #3 is wide of the mark.

It's not that there's a well-defined open standard.

It's that browsers will eat any old crap that's thrown at them and turn it into something plausible, if not precisely what the author intended or reader really wants.

Yes, there's a standard, and yes it's open. It's observed far more in the breach, as a few minutes with a validator on well-known sites will demonstrate.

Your comment alone (prior to my response to it) returns:

    Tidy found 21 warnings and 0 errors!

Even worse, the browsers could not handle standard html.

HTML was based on SGML and it has all the nice SGML features. Something like <title/Hello World/ was valid HTML afair.

But then the browser never implemented it properly, so html5 just describes the behaviour of the browsers.

>It's that browsers will eat any old crap that's thrown at them and turn it into something plausible, if not precisely what the author intended or reader really wants.

Reminds me of the fairly prescient "In Praise of Evolvable Systems" essay from 1996: https://web.archive.org/web/20190409041249/http://www.shirky...

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